Saville Inquiry: 'Witness couldn't believe what he had seen'
A man today recounted how it had no longer felt safe to venture outside after witnessing Bloody Sunday 29 years ago.
Alan Harkens told the Saville Inquiry he broke down crying on returning home on the day of the Army shootings in which 13 Catholic men and youths were killed.
A Protestant who converted to Catholicism on marrying a Catholic in the years before Bloody Sunday, Mr Harkens also maintained he saw no civilians with weapons at any stage on January 30 1972.
He said: "I didn’t go to work the next day as I couldn’t believe what I had seen on the Sunday.
"It didn’t feel safe to go out on the streets when the Army obviously weren’t protecting us.
"I had nothing against the soldiers and do not have any particular allegiance but I couldn’t believe what had happened."
Mr Harkens said he did not participate in the civil rights march which took place in Derry’s Bogside that day, but left his home in the Bogside to watch events.
He saw the body of Jack Duddy, 17, the first casualty to die, being tended by the then Fr Edward Daly but said he was unaware the troops were firing live rounds and assumed the teenager had been struck by a rubber bullet.
Later he said he encountered two bodies at separate locations in a stairwell of the Rossville Flats and said after seeing the first: "I first realised that what I had been told by other people, namely that people had been shot, was true."
And when he emerged from the flats he saw the body of Barney McGuigan, 42, who had been shot in the head, "a respectable-looking man, wearing a coat, shirt, suit and tie".
He said: "I cannot remember what time I got home but it was still daylight.
"My wife was inside the house, in hysterics and crying. I was in a state of shock about what I had seen and I also broke down crying."
Mr Harkens told the hearing in the Guildhall, Derry, that between six months and a year later he met a soldier at a social function who claimed to have been in the city on Bloody Sunday who said bodies of dead IRA men had "obviously" been retrieved from storage that day and claimed as victims of the military operation.
"He said he had been positioned on Butcher Gate and that he and his colleagues had stopped ambulances on Butcher Gate on the way to the hospital," he said.
"He said the bodies in the ambulance were dirty and smelly and it was obvious that they were the bodies of IRA men who had been killed, and their bodies hidden down manholes.
"From the way he was talking, my impression was that he was referring to men who had been shot before Bloody Sunday and it had now been decided to remove them from the manholes.
"I was not sure from my conversation with the soldier whether he generally thought this to be true or whether it was something that he had been told. After he had said this, I did not want to carry on our discussions and the conversation ended there."
