Mr Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein was accused yesterday of lacking the courage and integrity to co-operate with the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, for whose establishment he had personally pressed.
The accusation, to which Mr McGuinness angrily responded in a statement yesterday afternoon, came as counsel representing several hundred individual British soldiers called for an open and truthful explanation to the inquiry of what both wings of the IRA were doing on Bloody Sunday.
Mr Edwin Glasgow QC said: "We do not have statements; we do not even know the identities of the leading republicans who Mr Martin McGuinness . . . publicly asserted had given assurances that there would be no republican presence on Bloody Sunday."
He said they had neither the names of, nor statements or cooperation from, the vast majority of the 40 people believed to be members of or connected with the IRA in Derry. Save for "honourable exceptions", these people had failed to respond to letters from the tribunal. "We do not even know who the honourable exceptions were," said Mr Glasgow.
Counsel added: " . . . if it be the case that a relatively few dissident individuals failed to toe the party line and fired off shots without orders to do so, who were they?; what happened to them on Bloody Sunday or what happened to them after Bloody Sunday?"
Mr Glasgow referred to the opening statement by counsel to the tribunal, Mr Christopher Clarke QC, who had spoken of the tribunal's search for evidence "in all continents of the globe, save Antarctica".
Mr Glasgow remarked: "I have to say it was pretty galling to see that statement witnessed from the public gallery by Mr Martin McGuinness, who so far as we know does not live in Antarctica and who . . . has neither the courage nor the integrity nor the respect for this tribunal to co-operate with this inquiry, which he personally pressed for and which he was at pains to be seen in company with . . . on the very day it opened."
Later, counsel said it was a "disturbing, worrying feature of the case so far" that so many people who had made statements that referred to having seen civilian gunmen had not come forward and given statements to the tribunal's solicitors.
He said: " . . . it is clear that there has hitherto been a widespread, but not universal, reluctance on the part of many civilian witnesses to give full accounts, or in many cases any account at all, of all that they say and heard or knew about gunmen and terrorists and their activity."
Any failure now "on the part of witnesses or retired terrorists" to tell the tribunal the whole truth "either insults or makes a mockery of the widely publicised claim that there is universal support in this city for a truly open, fair and objective inquiry."
Mr Glasgow asserted that every single soldier who is alive and is believed to have fired a live round on Bloody Sunday had been traced. "All of those whom we represent have given statements . . . in stark contrast with the fact that not one single civilian gunman who fired . . . on that day has come forward and made a statement . . . "