An official in the first Bloody Sunday investigation has denied that that inquiry team had set out to build a case against the men who were shot dead. Mr William Smith (85), secretary to the Widgery inquiry in 1972, said it had not used forensic evidence to "pile up the case against the deceased".
He told the Saville inquiry, sitting in London on Thursday, that it had never been an "objective" to sway in this way the first inquiry into the shooting of 13 unarmed people by paratroopers during a civil rights march in Derry on January 30th, 1972.
Mr Smith, a former first secretary in the UK High Commission in South Africa, also strongly rejected allegations that he had been involved in or knew of "a conspiracy to suppress film and photographic evidence" of the events of Bloody Sunday.
The retired civil servant read out in full an undated memo he had written to Lord Widgery, the then Lord Chief Justice (LCJ) chairing the original investigation.
It read: "The LCJ will pile up the case against the deceased, including forensic coincidence and the . . . readiness of local people to remove guns, but will conclude that he cannot find with certainty that any one of the 13 was a gunman."
Mr Michael Mansfield QC, acting for families of several of the dead and injured, asked Mr Smith what this statement meant.
"The question is, therefore, whether before this was written . . . you had gleaned from the Lord Chief Justice that one of the objectives that he had was to pile up the case against the deceased," the lawyer said. Mr Smith replied: "Certainly not, I did not form any such impression at any time in the proceedings."
Lord Saville refused to allow questions on who had drafted the Widgery report after suggestions that Mr Smith, a secretary, had written parts of it. Lord Saville declared that this was irrelevant saying: "I am sorry to put it like this . . . I do not personally care whether Mr Smith drafted the entire Widgery report because it does not seem to me it has anything to do with the subject matter of this inquiry, which is not how Lord Widgery conducted his inquiry but what happened on Bloody Sunday."
The hearing was adjourned until Monday. - (PA)