Top soldier's PA destroyed Bloody Sunday notes
The personal assistant to the most senior British soldier present in Derry on Bloody Sunday has denied destroying his notes of the event because he had witnessed a massacre of civilians.
The assistant, identified only as INQ1832, kept his notes of Bloody Sunday for 27 years, but then destroyed them as he prepared to give evidence to the Saville Inquiry.
In January 1972, INQ1832 was assistant to General Robert Ford, the commander of land forces in the North at the time of the Bloody Sunday killings.
In evidence today, he said he accompanied General Ford on the ground on Bloody Sunday and wrote up a diary of his movements that day. In the summer of 1972, INQ1832 made notes from these documents and destroyed the originals.
After being contacted in September 1998 about his evidence to the Saville Inquiry, he retrieved the notes from his attic, typed up a fuller statement from them and then threw the old notes away, he said.
A lawyer representing some of the families of the Bloody Sunday victims suggested that this was done deliberately to cover up a massacre.
"You had seen something terrible that day which you knew would come back to haunt you," he said.
"What I want to ask you is whether the destruction of notes . . . is because when you were on the roof, you did see effectively what was a massacre and you have erased it?"
INQ1832 denied the accusation and insisted that he only destroyed the notes because he had typed up a new statement and had no need, therefore, to keep the documents.
