BLOODY SUNDAY INQUIRY/DAY 193: A team of British journalists investigating Bloody Sunday heard that "orders had come down" that photographs taken by army and police photographers on the day should be destroyed, the inquiry was told yesterday.
Mr John Barry, who headed the Sunday Times "Insight" team, said they also picked up army gossip that there had been "an almighty brawl" among the paratroopers on the evening of Bloody Sunday, involving the unit which had fired shots and the soldiers who had not.
"The story we heard was that the Paras who had shot were of one particular company (and) had been essentially the troublemakers of the battalion. That was why they were in the company - it was notorious and (caused) disciplinary problems," he said. The story was that the brawl had to be sorted out by military police.
In the weeks after Bloody Sunday the team had tried but failed to obtain what was believed to be a considerable number of photographs taken by army and police photographers. Mr Barry thought the source who told them that orders were given for the material to be destroyed was a colonel at the Lisburn headquarters.
He described attending, by invitation, a dinner in the Parachute Regiment officers' mess in the months after Bloody Sunday, while the newspaper's extensive article on the shootings was still being researched.
It was very evident on this occasion that "beneath a veneer of good manners everyone present despised me", said the witness. "Col Wilford (OC of 1 Para) seemed to me to be a man in denial while his officers had apparently persuaded themselves that they were the true victims of the day, being as they saw it, pilloried by a press they viewed as hand-in-glove with the IRA."
The Para officers had refused to address any detailed questions and insisted that their men had faced an organised IRA ambush and that everyone shot had been a gunman or bomber. However, they had acknowledged that the planned 'scoop up' (arrest) operation had failed almost immediately (and) they blamed this on a failure of reconnaissance by Major Ted Loden, commander of the support company. It was evident that Loden "had been anointed battalion scapegoat for what had happened".
Mr Barry said the evidence amassed by the Insight team drove them to conclude that there had been no organised attack by either wing of the IRA upon the army, (but) at the same time it was clear that there had been more shooting at the army than either wing of the IRA represented afterwards. They could find no independent evidence that any nail bombs had been thrown.
Mr Barry, who was a member of the Insight team from 1966 to 1976, was later a managing editor of the Sunday Times. He left the paper when it was taken over by Rupert Murdoch and is now with Newsweek in Washington.
The inquiry continues today.