Bloody Sunday prosecutions ‘would set dangerous precedent for future Army operations’

Lord Ramsbotham, who was military assistant to the chief of the general staff at the time of the shootings, said he is hopeful that soldiers from support company of the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment will not face charges 47 years on from the killings.

The 84-year-old said there is “profound” concern within the Army about the effect such prosecutions might have on a soldier who, he said, “only obeys an order”.

Lord Ramsbotham told the Press Association: “The position of a commander giving an order to somebody to open fire, if it’s likely to end up in court, the soldier receiving the order and the person giving the order will think twice about it in the future.

“And that could have very serious implications if we’re defending this country. I’m thinking outside the box, as it were, and Londonderry. But I am thinking in terms of the command and control of the Army as a whole.”

He added: “I hope that they are not prosecuted because it sets a very difficult precedent. It’s a very dangerous precedent.”

Lord Ramsbotham, who was then Lieutenant Colonel David Ramsbotham, was in London when he took a phone call on the evening of Sunday January 30 1972, telling him people had been killed at the civil rights march.

He said: “I was obviously very sorry that lives had been lost because one never likes lives being lost at all, and the thought that the soldiers might have been involved in killing people on the streets of Londonderry.”

He recalled that General Sir Michael Carver, then head of the Army, had been “appalled” by the news.

He said: “As far as my boss was concerned, he was appalled that a civil rights march, which is what it was advertised as, should have resulted in so many deaths.”

He and General Carver visited the regiment a week after the shootings and Lord Ramsbotham said he “got the impression that the regiment was full of remorse for what had happened and was obviously nervous about the inquiry into what was going on, what had happened”.

Lord Ramsbotham said he was “not excusing anything that happened”, but added that he felt it was time for an end to the idea of historical prosecutions.

“I’m involved in the general hope that a line could be drawn and we could stop the idea of prosecuting people for something that happened in the 1970s,” he said. “I’m not talking about Bloody Sunday, I’m talking about the general historical inquiries.”