The tragic and inevitable doomsday situation which has been universally forecast for Northern Ireland arrived in Londonderry yesterday afternoon when soldiers firing into a large crowd of civil rights demonstrators, shot and killed 13 civilians. Seventeen more people, including a woman, were injured by gunfire and another woman was seriously injured after being knocked down by a speeding armoured car.
The army reported two military casualties and said that their soldiers had arrested between 50 and 60 people, who had been allegedly involved in the illegal protest march.
After the shooting, which lasted for about 25 minutes in and around the Rossville Flats area of Bogside, the streets had all the appearance of the aftermath of Sharpeville. Where, only moments before, thousands of men and women had been milling around, drifting slowly towards a protest meeting to be held at Free Derry Corner, there was only a handful of bleeding bodies, some lying still, others still moving with pain, on the white concrete of the square.
The Army╒s official explanation for the killing was that their troops had fired in response to a number of snipers who had opened up on them from below the flats. But those of us at the meeting heard only one shot before the soldiers opened up with their high velocity rifles.
And while it is impossible to be absolutely sure, one came away with the firm impression, reinforced by dozens of eyewitnesses, that the soldiers, men of the 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, flown in specially from Belfast, may have fired needlessly into the huge crowd.
Miss Bernadette Devlin said it was ╥bloody cold-blooded murder.╙ Mr John Hume said it was ╥another Sharpeville,╙ and he demanded the immediate withdrawal of all these ╥uniformed murderers.╙ Mr Michael Canavan of the Derry Citizens╒ Central Council said ╥It was impossible to say who fired first. Personally I am sure it was the army, but it doesn╒t really matter. What was so terrible and so tragic was that the soldiers fired into a huge crowd of people, and fired indiscriminately at that. The death toll must show us that their firing was indiscriminate.╙
The death toll at 7.30 pm, three hours after the shooting, was said to be 12, all men and all said to be in their mid-twenties. A thirteenth victim was reported later. The assistant secretary of the Altnagelvin Hospital, Mr L Thompson, said: ╥I have seen 12 bodies here that have all probably been killed by gunfire. There are 16 people in the wards. Fifteen of these have gunshot wounds and one of them is a woman. There is also a girl, named as Miss Burke, aged 18, who is seriously injured after being struck by a vehicle. I understand it was an army truck.╙
An army statement at 7.30 pm said that after an hour of heavy stoning, men of the 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment moved into the William Street and Rossville Street areas from behind the units who were manning barricades. ╥They went in to arrest people in the crowd and chased and caught several men who were running away,╙ the statement said. ╥While this operation was in progress, gunmen opened up from rubble at the base of the Rossville Flats and soldiers returned the fire. Casualty returns are still coming in.╙
It is understood that about fifty people were taken in army vehicles to a nearby naval base and were then handed over to the RUC, many to be charged with riotous behaviour. The 1,500 troops came under the direct command of the commanding officer of Five Brigade, Brigadier Pat MacLellan, though the commander, Land Forces, Major General Robert Ford, was also there in a supervisory capacity. Assistant Chief Constable David Corbett directed the 500 policemen deployed in the city.
The march got under way from the Bishofields, three miles from the centre of the city at about 2.30 pm, almost on schedule. Taking part was certainly the largest crowd of civil rights protestors ever seen in Londonderry, and estimates of the number of participants ranged from 10,000 to 20,000. The crowd was led by an open-topped lorry with the speakers, Miss Devlin, Lord Brockway, and Ivan Cooper, and the organisers on board. The crowd behind filled the streets and stretched back for about 1,000 yards.
Trouble was inevitable and when, after passing down Lecky Road, Rossville Street and William Street, the crowd encountered the first of the army barricades which were to prevent them getting into Waterloo Place and the Guildhall, fierce rioting started.
Men of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Greenjackets, in William Street, endured a full 10 minutes of heavy stoning before opening up on the mob with CS gas and a dozen hefty shots from a large water cannon, drenching hundreds of marchers and journalists in purple indelible dye.
This happened at about 3.30 pm and from then until about 4.15 the mob, growing angrier by the minute, was engaged in a fierce tussle with soldiers at this barricade and others in Great James Street and Sackville Street. Huge quantities of gas and hundreds of rubber bullets were fired at this stage and many of the rioters were injured.
Then, at 4.05 pm, a single shot was fired in William Street, presumably by an IRA man. The Provisionals had been under strict local orders to keep their guns at home and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association stewards did their best to keep order and look out for possible gunmen. Lord Brockway praised the discipline of the crowd.
The single shot was ignored, though some people in the crowd, which had now concentrated in front of the flats, spent several minutes pushing marchers out of the way at an entry in which, it was presumed, another sniper was lurking.
Shortly before 4.15 pm Mr Kevin McCorry, the civil rights organiser, began to walk through the crowd, telling them through a megaphone that a meeting was starting at Free Derry Corner and that Miss Devlin, Mr Cooper, and Lord Brockway were to speak.
Just as this meeting was getting underway four or five armoured cars appeared in William Street and raced into the Rossville Street square, and several thousand people began to run away. The move had been expected and it is a tactic we have all seen before ╤ nothing, not even gas, breaks up a crowd more effectively than several huge armoured cars careering through the streets.
But it was then that the situation changed tragically. Paratroops piled out of their vehicles, many ran forward to make arrests, but others rushed to the street corners. It was these men, perhaps 20 in all, who opened fire with their rifles. I saw three men fall to the ground. One was still obviously alive, with blood pumping from his leg. The others, both apparently in their teens, seemed dead.
The meeting at Free Derry Corner broke up in hysteria as thousands of people either ran or dived for the ground.
Army snipers could be seen firing continuously towards the central Bogside streets and at one stage a lone army sniper on a street corner fired two shots towards me as I peered around a corner. One shot chipped a large chunk of masonry from a wall behind me.
Then people could be seen moving forward in Fahan Street, their hands above their heads. One man was carrying a white handkerchief. Gunfire was directed even at them and they fled or fell to the ground. A priest giving the last rites to a dying man was reportedly grabbed and taken away by the paratroopers.
There was certainly some firing from the IRA. I heard one submachine-gun open up from inside the flats and heard a number of small-calibre weapons being fired intermittently, but the sound which predominated was the heavy, hard banging of the British SLRs, and this continued for about 10 or 15 minutes.
Intermittent firing went on until about 5.05 pm. During one stage I was sheltering in a Roman Catholic church and as, with two other reporters, I went around a corner, a civilian armed with a 22 rifle, opened up at us. He may have been a short-sighted IRA man, but whoever he was he was firing from a Protestant part of the city.
Weeping men and women in the Bogside spent the next half hour in Lecky Road, pushing bodies of dead and injured people into cars and driving them to hospital. I saw seven such cars drive away with some of the bleeding bodies on the back seats, inert and lifeless.
By 5.30 pm it was all over. A full moon was rising over a shocked and still numbed Londonderry, and heavily armed soldiers were still keeping Bogside and the Creggan cordoned off.
Mr Finbar O╒Kane, one of the civil rights organisers, said he had never thought that the Ulster crisis would ever get as bad as this. ╥It was a shocking, terrible thing,╙ he went on. ╥Those soldiers shot into a crowd and shot down innocent men. What on earth will happen to us all now?╙
