Saville Inquiry: I want to meet soldier, says shot man
One of the men wounded on Bloody Sunday today challenged the soldier responsible to meet him face-to-face and tell the truth about what he did.
Michael Bradley issued the call from the witness box of the Saville Inquiry, which is probing the Army shootings which followed a civil rights march in Londonderry 29 years ago.
Mr Bradley survived the gunfire in the city’s Bogside which killed 13 men that day, but suffered wounds to both his forearms and his chest when shot in the car park of the Rossville Flats.
He said he was shot as he angrily shouted at soldiers in the moments after Jack Duddy, 17, was shot dead in the same area.
‘‘I would love to meet the soldier who shot me face-to-face,’’ Mr Bradley said.
‘‘I would be angry and I would ask him how he had slept for 26 years I know how I have.
‘‘I was innocent, I did not have a nail bomb or anything but I was shot. I know even with this new inquiry that we will not get the justice we would like, but I would like the soldier to tell the truth.
‘‘I don’t want him hung, drawn and quartered just to tell the truth.’’
Edwin Glasgow QC, acting for most of the soldiers, later said: ‘‘I have not suggested and will not suggest that you were armed with a nail bomb or with any lethal weapon.’’
Mr Bradley said he was unable to recall whether he may have picked up a stone to throw in the moments before he was shot, admitting: ‘‘I just went berserk.’’
Mr Glasgow added: ‘‘I will not suggest that your possession of a brick or anything like that, if you did so, justified being shot.’’
Mr Bradley, who was 22 on Bloody Sunday, was in the witness box at the Guildhall, Derry, for 70 minutes.
His voice faltered occasionally as he testified.
He said he was clearly unarmed when confronting the troops.
Asked how far he was from them, he said: ‘‘It was still close enough for him as a trained, experienced soldier to realise that the gentleman facing him was no threat to him.’’
He went on: ‘‘The next thing I remember is feeling a heavy thud on my right upper arm. I threw my left arm over my right arm.
‘‘My first reaction was that I had been hit by a rubber bullet and I remember saying ‘I’m hit, I’m hit’.
‘‘A young man close to me said I wasn’t hit but that I’d been shot. I then saw the blood. It was streaming down my arm.
‘‘I turned and staggered over to the low wall and along the wall to the gap blocks two and three of the Rossville Flats, crouching as I went along.’’
He believed he lost consciousness and came to in a house.
‘‘I felt cold and I was shaking, I though I was going to die. I could feel my stomach burning and I didn’t know what it was,’’ Mr Bradley said.
During his recovery in hospital, he was unable to feed himself because of the injuries to his arms.
One day a young woman soldier asked to feed him - and he agreed, in spite of objections by another of the injured, Damien Donaghy, who was also in the ward.
‘‘The young girl was very apologetic to me but I asked her was it her that had shot me.
‘‘She said ‘No’, but she told me that they were pulled off the streets and back into barracks that day. It was the Paratroopers and Anglian Regiment on the streets that day.
‘‘She said there was murder in Ebrington Barracks that night as the soldiers were playing hell with the Paratroopers.’’
