An IRA man armed with a Thompson submachine-gun fired the first shots on Bloody Sunday, one of Britain's most distinguished soldiers told the inquiry yesterday.
Gen Sir Michael Rose (63), now retired, was commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Bosnia, and headed the SAS operation during the 1980 Iranian embassy siege in London and the Falklands war.
He was a captain and press officer in the Coldstream Guards on January 30th, 1972, the day paratroopers shot dead 13 unarmed men and boys in Derry. A 14th man died later.
Sir Michael said he was briefed that the IRA might try to turn the march into a "bloodbath" by using it as cover to attack the army, but he had not been told about any large-scale arrest plan.
Pressed by Mr Michael Mansfield QC, for one of the bereaved families, that the IRA had never used civil rights marches in this way, he replied: "On this occasion they chose to fire. I know, they fired with a Thompson machine-gun."
Sir Michael said he was looking at the end of the march from St Eugene's cathedral when he heard gunfire from Rossville flats.
Pressed by Mr Arthur Harvey QC, representing many of the bereaved and injured, he insisted the first shots he heard were from a terrorist's weapon and not the army standard-issue rifle. "I did not hear any SLR [self-loading rifle] at that point," he said.
"The trigger for my moving down from Eugene's cathedral was undoubtedly and unequivocally and unambiguously and without any doubt at all, a burst of Thompson machine-gun fire."
He said as he moved into the Bogside, he came under fire from what he believed were terrorist rifles, and heard the army return fire.
He asked a paratrooper what the soldiers were shooting at, and the paratrooper pointed at the Rossville flats, where he saw half a dozen figures running semi-crouched along second or third-floor galleries.
He did not ask any further questions but assumed they were gunmen, although he could not see any civilians with weapons. He had binoculars and a notebook, but admitted he had neither used the binoculars nor written anything down, either then or later.
Shortly after he met the paratrooper, another soldier asked him what he was doing there, and he left to his regiment at St Eugene's and later returned to camp.
The general, testifying at the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, said he was not connected to the SAS in 1972.
Mr Mansfield had to rephrase his question about the general's SAS career. Sir Michael had refused to answer at first, saying it did not concern Bloody Sunday, and the official government line was not to comment on special forces.
He then recalled that officers were warned the IRA would begin a shooting war with the army in which innocent people could get killed.
"This was more specific than a rumour," he said.
"The most germane thing that I can remember was that there was a warning of danger that the IRA were going to try to turn the civil rights march into a bloodbath . . . the battalion was to be alert to this and was not to let it occur."
He said the warning came from police or intelligence sources, and was announced at an army battalion orders group meeting a few days before Bloody Sunday.
With the likelihood of gunfire, officers were told not to "overreact" or to have a "disproportionate response" to stone throwing, Sir Michael said.
They would return fire if a member of the battalion or someone in the crowd of civilians was in danger.
He said a firefight at the march would have been particularly attractive to the IRA because it would be witnessed by the world's media, who had been invited to attend to counteract its view that the army in Northern Ireland was "oppressive".
He said he was convinced the IRA risked civilian casualties by opening fire first against the army and using the crowd as cover. "We were warned that this may happen, and it did."