British army photographers gained access to the bodies of victims in a hospital mortuary late at night on Bloody Sunday, in breach of normal rules concerning the preservation of evidence, the inquiry heard yesterday.
The state pathologist who carried out post-mortems on six of the 13 civilians who were shot dead on the day admitted that he was never made aware, until yesterday, that the army had insisted on getting access to the morgue at Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry in the early hours of Monday, January 31st, 1972.
Dr Derek Carson said that he did not see the bodies until shortly before he began the autopsy examinations at 3 p.m. that Monday afternoon, the day after the shootings.
Replying to Mr Seamus Treacy QC, for a number of victims' families, Dr Carson said: "The bodies would normally be kept secured in the form and position in which they had been admitted to the mortuary until the team had gathered for the autopsy - that would be the pathologist, the scenes-of-crime officer (SOCO) and the police."
The witness said the normal practice would be that photographs would be taken by the RUC photography branch at autopsies, on his directions.
When counsel put it to him that it would be "highly irregular" for photographs to be taken in any other way, he replied: "Well, it would not be within my sphere, certainly. I would not instruct photographs to be taken in any other way."
Counsel drew attention to a statement supplied to the inquiry by an army photographer identified as Soldier 223, who is to give direct evidence at a later stage. The statement says that he and another soldier went to the hospital "to verify if a 13-year-old had been killed", and they were admitted to the mortuary when they told hospital staff that they needed to take photographs "for continuity of evidence purposes".
After hearing legal argument and details of a PSNI threat assessment, the tribunal decided not to order another witness, Mr Kieran Gill, to reveal the identities of several IRA sources he spoke to around the time of Bloody Sunday.
Mr Gill, who was a staff journalist with the Irish Press Group, had described locating and interviewing an Official IRA member, who admitted firing a revolver around a door of Rossville Street Flats after the British army had fired up to 150 rounds and people lay dead outside the flats.
The witness declined to name this man, or the Provisional IRA source who had mentioned him. He also refused to identify a Provisional IRA member whom he witnessed supervising the loading of weapons into a car in the Creggan before the Civil Rights march.
The tribunal heard that there was a reasonable prospect of discovering the Official IRA man's identity by other means and it decided to make no order at present on that issue. It heard that the police assessment rated the level of threat to Mr Gill's personal safety as "moderate, rising to significant", if he was compelled to identify the Provisional IRA man he had seen in the Creggan.
Lord Saville said that the tribunal considered Mr Gill's fears to be justified and that there was no compelling reason for requiring him to name this source at present.
The inquiry continues on Tuesday.