A former Royal Navy sailor and Ulster Defence Regiment soldier today told an inquiry he was ready to take up arms with an IRA volunteer against his past comrades on Bloody Sunday.
Mr Anthony Martin (63), an organiser of the civil rights march in Derry, said he was so angry he tried to get rifles to attack the army.
Mr Martin, who served for 12 years in the Royal Navy and one year in the UDR, said the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, of which he was a member, was assured by both the Official and Provisional IRA that there would be no weapons at the march.
He was speaking at the Saville Inquiry in Derry's Guildhall, where the events of January 30th, 1972, when 13 men were shot dead, were being investigated.
"In order to make sure the march would be peaceful, we contacted the Provisional IRA and the Official IRA," he told the inquiry in a statement. "We asked them not to participate and not to bring any flags or banners.
"They gave us the assurance that there would be no IRA flags or guns. We told them we did not want any trouble because the march would end at the Guildhall and would be very high profile." He said he had heard after the event that some IRA members carried pistols for "personal protection".
After coming under fire himself and helping move the bodies of some of the dead and injured, Mr Martin said he agreed to help a junior IRA volunteer, known to him only as "John", to collect some guns from a car parked in Glenfada Park North.
"I was so angry by that point that I said I would take one of the rifles myself and do something".
He said there were many gun-laden IRA cars routinely parked around Derry in that period to stop weapons from being seized in army raids. The fact it was parked there was "completely incidental" to the march, he said. But with soldiers around the car when they went to it, he decided to withdraw.
PA