The legal team representing the majority of British soldiers who were in Derry on Bloody Sunday will not argue that the known victims were carrying weapons, but will nevertheless contend that gunmen and bombers were operating on the day, the inquiry heard yesterday.
Mr Edwin Glasgow QC asserted that, on the basis of civilian evidence alone, there appeared to have been many untraced or unidentified casualties, and that these included some "who were engaged in terrorist activity of one kind or another".
Mr Glasgow, with four other barristers, acts for some 440 individual soldiers. On Bloody Sunday they ranged from teenage recruits to high-ranking officers. He stressed that "we do not act and cannot speak for the army or for the Ministry of Defence".
In an opening submission he accepted that none of his clients claimed to have recognised any of the publicly identified victims as having been a person at whom they fired.
They would not contend, unless there was new evidence, that those who had been identified were armed with lethal weapons. It followed, "as has rightly been accepted for a long time", that innocent people were killed on Bloody Sunday. That was sincerely regretted; for even one innocent person to lose his life in horrifying circumstances was one of the greatest tragedies that could occur.
But for an innocent person to be falsely accused of murder or of conspiracy to murder, "where what he was doing or attempting to do was nothing more or less than his duty in those same horrific circumstances", was almost equally abhorrent.
He said it was their "positive case" that civilian gunmen were operating on Bloody Sunday and that there appeared to have been many more missing casualties than had been accounted for. Counsel said they would positively assert, as an issue for the tribunal to consider, "that gunmen and bombers were killed on Bloody Sunday".
What the soldiers had done on Bloody Sunday was done in reaction to mob violence and sustained and physical serious attacks.
Those who fired live rounds would say without exception that they aimed and shot at, and only at, those who they believed to be using firearms or to be threatening lethal violence to them or others. They accepted that they would not have been entitled to fire on any other people, counsel said.