A British army spokesman last night said he could not confirm or deny reports about secret British army memos written before the events of Bloody Sunday which suggested that "selected ringleaders" in the Bogside and Creggan areas of Derry be shot if the army wanted to regain control of the city.
One of the memos, entitled "The situation in Londonderry as at 7 January 1972", is said to have been written by the Commander of Land Forces in the North, Gen Robert Ford, and addressed to the General Officer Commanding British Forces, Lieut Gen Sir Harry Tuzo, according to yesterday's Sunday Tribune. Fourteen unarmed civilians were shot by members of the Parachute Regiment during a civil rights march in Derry on January 30th, 1972.
The memo is reported to be one of several documents passed to the Bloody Sunday inquiry under Lord Saville. Another Ministry of Defence memo is said to consider the possibility of letting the Bogside and Creggan "rot from within" by spreading disease and allowing essential services to breakdown. The option of ceding the areas to the Republic is also discussed.
In his memo, Gen Ford, then the second-in-command of the British army in Northern Ireland, is reported to conclude that the "minimum force necessary to achieve a restoration of law and order is to shoot selected ringleaders".
Another document available to Lord Saville is said to be a confidential paper entitled Marches in 1972, written only three days before Bloody Sunday by Lieut Col Harry Dalzell-Payne "to try and anticipate some of the problems we may face on Monday, 31 January 1972, if events on Sunday prove our worst fears".
According to the paper, stronger military measures would have to be taken to uphold the ban on marches. Such measures would, however, "inevitably lead to further accusations of brutality and ill-treatment of non-violent demonstrators".
The spokesman said he had not seen the documents but could not deny they existed, either. "In situations like the one in Derry in 1972, senior officers would have a responsibility to discuss `worst case scenarios'," he added.