Five former members of the Official IRA were today granted anonymity to testify at the Bloody Sunday Inquiry.
Tribunal chairman Lord Saville of Newdigate accepted that the five had "genuine and reasonable" fears for their safety if their identities were made public at the new investigation into the killings of 13 men in Londonderry almost 30 years ago.
Today's move represented another step forward for the tribunal, which has long been bidding to place members of both the disbanded Official IRA and the Provisional IRA into the witness box to answer questions about what they were doing on Bloody Sunday.
The men at the centre of the ruling were all said to have been members of the Official wing on January 30 1972, when British Army Paratroopers opened fire in the city's Bogside after a civil rights march.
Two of them are believed to have opened fire that day, one towards troops positioned on the perimeter of the Bogside before they moved in, the other close to the then Fr Edward Daly - now retired Bishop of Derry - after the first victim was shot and killed.
Today's decision means the five will now be assigned codenames or letters to identify them at the inquiry, in the same way most of the soldiers at are already known at the hearing.
A lawyer for the five, Mr Brian Fee QC, said his clients had moved on from their past activities and had new lives unconnected with their previous involvement with the Officials.
But he cited fears of attack from paramilitaries, especially loyalists, and claimed his clients would be "very soft targets" and their families even softer targets.
He told the tribunal in the Guildhall, Derry, the move would have "very marginal" interference with the open, public nature of the inquiry.
And he claimed it would have no adverse effect on the search for the truth about events that day.
Earlier Mr Fee rejected a submission by some of the relatives of the victims, opposing the move on the grounds that the men's identities were already known.
The same argument had already been given the short shrift by the Court of Appeal in the case of the soldiers, he said.
The inquiry was established in 1998 but until this year only two men admitted membership of either wings of the IRA to it.
However earlier this year Sinn Fein's Mr Martin McGuinness came forward, apparently admitting being the Provisional IRAs' second-in-command in Derry on Bloody Sunday. He is expected to give evidence in coming months to rebut claims from an MI5 agent that he fired the first shot that day.
PA