BLOODY SUNDAY INQUIRY/Day 210: A Parachute Regiment soldier who took part in Bloody Sunday admitted to a journalist some years later that the 14 civilians who died were probably wrongfully killed, the inquiry heard yesterday.
Mr Tony Geraghty, former chief reporter of the Sunday Times, said that when he took up parachuting as a sport in the late 1970s, one of his friends was a soldier who had been in the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment in Derry on the day of the shootings.
Mr Geraghty, who had been a paratrooper in the 1950s, said that in a pub conversation after a day's skydiving in England, he had put it to the soldier that the civilians who were killed had apparently not been armed. His response had been: "Well, yes, we did kill innocent people that day. That is regrettable, but we did kill other people who we think were combatants". The man had claimed that a similar number of IRA people had been killed or wounded and that they had been smuggled across the border to the Republic.
Mr Geraghty told Mr Barry MacDonald QC, for a number of victims' families, that the soldier had been a senior NCO on Bloody Sunday. He was in the first wave of paratroopers who entered the Bogside.
Mr Geraghty said he later used the information in a book which he wrote on the Troubles, The Irish War, in the 1990s. When researching the book, he made approaches to veterans of the Parachute Regiment who were known directly or indirectly to him, and he received limited help.
The information he gathered was sufficient for him to treat with respect the possibility that the first shot fired on Bloody Sunday was, as the paras saw it, an incoming round. Mr Geraghty said it seemed possible that this round was a "blue on blue" gunshot - a shot fired by other British soldiers on the city walls.
He said one of these sources was "very ready" to give evidence to the inquiry in the future.
Mr Geraghty said he could not name his sources, but he was willing to pass on a letter from the inquiry.
The tribunal chairman, Lord Saville, told the witness that the tribunal would not at present go into the question of whether he should reveal his sources, but there was a prospect that they would have to come back to the matter, in which case he could be recalled.