DAY 224: A strong warning was sent out by the Saville tribunal yesterday that its work may remain incomplete unless former members of paramilitary organisations from the time of Bloody Sunday come forward to provide evidence.
The chairman, Lord Saville, voiced an urgent request for more IRA witnesses as the long-running inquiry adjourned for the summer recess with the prospect of at least a further 18 months of hearings and deliberations before producing a report.
He pointed out that the inquiry, set up in 1998, is now in its fifth year, including more than two years of oral hearings in Derry. In spite of the vast amount of evidence already gathered, he said, the tribunal was concerned that only a very few people who were paramilitaries at the time had come forward to help in the search for the truth of what happened on January 30th, 1972.
The evidence of these people was of self-evident importance, he commented, and no good reason had been provided as to why they had not come forward.
If these people did not come forward, he added, "it will be urged upon us, with considerable force that the only inference to be drawn from their failure to co-operate with the inquiry is that they, or the organisations in question, have something that they wish to hide about their activities on Bloody Sunday.
He pointed out also that such people would be doing the families of those who died, and the wounded, a disservice, as these had all expressed the desire for this to be a full and thorough inquiry - "a desire which may be frustrated if the people in question do not come forward.
This was the most significant of several similar appeals issued by the tribunal and by the interested parties at the inquiry since the hearings began in Derry's Guildhall. On the basis of information made public so far, only seven prospective witnesses had presented themselves as having been members of paramilitary organisations in Derry in 1972.
These include six former members of the Official IRA, and Mr Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin, who has acknowledged that he was second in command of the Provisional IRA in the city and is the only admitted former member of that organisation to offer to testify.
While all of these seven have provided statements or draft statements to the inquiry, none of them has yet given oral evidence.
At yesterday's session, the tribunal adjourned consideration of an application on behalf of the paratrooper known only as soldier 027 that he should be granted screening and protection from being photographed when he gives evidence to the inquiry at a venue in London, probably in the autumn.
Soldier 027 is in hiding under a witness-protection scheme pending his appearance as a witness, because the inquiry was advised there was a risk to his safety. His solicitor has told the tribunal that 027 claims his landlord was attacked and beaten by an unidentified man who threatened my client's life if he did not desist from what he was doing in relation to Bloody Sunday.
Other efforts appeared to have been made to locate him and he had been described as a traitor on a website associated with the Parachute Regiment. His solicitor said his client continued to feel apprehension, although he stressed that he had never expressed any specific opinion about the source of the threat.
However, Mr David Lolled-Ones QC, who represents about 100 serving or former paratroopers who were on duty in Derry on Bloody Sunday, described the assertions made on soldier 027's behalf as prejudicial and a slur on his clients.