The Paratroopers who opened fire killing civil rights marchers on Bloody Sunday were troublemakers with disciplinary problems in the Parachute Regiment's Ist Battalion who had been lumped together in a single notorious company, it was claimed today.
Following the shootings there was an "almighty brawl" that night between them and other members of the battalion who did not open fire, the Saville Inquiry into the shootings was told.
Mr John Barry, who was editor of the Sunday TimesInsight team which carried out a detailed investigation into the deaths of 13 people on Bloody Sunday, told day 193 of the inquiry that he was given the story by military sources, but said it was "gossip" which was not included in his newspaper's final report.
However when pressed he said the story was that "there had been an almighty brawl among the Paras that evening because most of the Paras had not shot and the Paras who had shot were of one particular company.
"The story we heard was that the company had been essentially the troublemakers of the battalion, that was why they were in the company, it was notorious."
He said of Bloody Sunday: "Virtually nobody had realised what was going on until it was too late to stop it."
Mr Barry, said in the months ahead of Bloody Sunday his team had acquired a host of sources in the army, civil service and police who saw events in Northern Ireland spiralling out of control and were troubled by the coercive role into which they saw the army being forced.
"The Parachute Regiment was almost uniformly disliked by the other army units in Northern Ireland as being the mailed fist of this increasingly aggressive military posture," he said.
He recalled going to a dinner in the officer's mess of Ist Para, during his investigation. It was like no other he had attended as it was "so evident that beneath a veneer of good manners everyone present despised me."
He said the Colonel Derek Wilford, commander of Ist Para, "seemed to me to be a man in denial".
His officers had apparently persuaded themselves that "they were the true victims of the day, being as they saw it pilloried by a press they viewed as hand in glove with the IRA," said Mr Barry.
"They argued to me that they had done the job they had been sent to do -'cleaning house' was a phrase used, I recall - and they now professed themselves bewildered by the uproar."
Para officers refused to address any detailed questions and insisted that their men had faced an organised IRA ambush and that "everyone shot had been a gunman or bomber", he said.
Another witness told the inquiry how police stood back and watched as paratroopers beat and assaulted people inside an army base after their arrest on Bloody Sunday.
Mr Joseph Lynn, who was 18 at the time, said soldiers were completely out of control.
"They were doing whatever they wanted, they had lost it, they were not in control of themselves; it was almost like they had been taken off a leash and felt that they had to make the most of it," he said.
But he added:" They were enjoying what they were doing."
Mr Lynn, who had walked 14 miles from his home in Strabane to attend the march, told of being "thrashed" with rubber truncheons as he was forced to run a gauntlet of soldiers and dogs into the custody suite following his arrest.
Once inside he was hit more, forced to stand against a wall balanced on his tiptoes and kicked several times in the testicles by a soldier identified only as Lance Corporal 229. The soldier was "foaming at the mouth", he said.
"Throughout the beating the RUC and other paras were standing in the same room and watching. The RUC took no part in the beatings, but that was the point, they didn't even try to stop it - they did nothing."
He said later he was forced to stand in line with other detainees so close to gas fires that "I got burnt down the left side of my face and I could hear my hair burning and crackling like rice crispies."
Another man standing beside him under the gas fires asked troops for a glass of water, he said.
"He was told to open his mouth and that he would have a glass of water. As Dennis opened his mouth L/C 229 spat down into the back of his throat, that made me want to heave."
Mr Lynn added: "It was one of the dirtiest acts I have ever witnessed in my life" and still made him almost sick.
The inquiry continues tomorrow.