A senior military historian contested today that there is nothing suspicious about the disappearance of 1,000 British army photographs taken on Bloody Sunday.
Mr John Harding, deputy head of the Ministry of Defence's Army Historical Branch responsible for co-ordinating MoD searches for the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, believes they may have had little historical value.
The inquiry is investigating circumstances surrounding the killing of 13 unarmed men by British paratroopers on January 30th, 1972 during civil rights march in Derry.
Mystery still surrounds the whereabouts of 1,000 army photographs taken on Bloody Sunday. They were shot at different locations by photographers from about seven different regiments. It is unclear if they were different photographs or copies of the same images.
Soldiers recalled seeing photographers at Rossville Street, on top of the Embassy building, and one of the paras said he was with a photographer when they debussed in Rossville Street, the inquiry has been told.
Mr Barry MacDonald QC, representing many of the bereaved and injured, suggested that photographs may have been filed, used for intelligence purposes and become classified documents.
Mr MacDonald asked: "Do you not think it is highly suspicious, to say the least, that when 10 photographers were taking hundreds of photographs from seven different regiments, that not one of those photographs survives?"
Mr Harding said: "I have been unable to trace these photographs and can find no audit trail to track them down from 1972 to today."
Mr MacDonald asked: "In circumstances where the Parachute Regiment stands charged with mass murder, you decided that the appropriate way to search for photographs that may implicate that regiment or its former members was to ask them to do the search themselves.
"Do you not see that it is a bit like the police asking a murder suspect to search his own house for the murder weapon and then dropping the inquiry when he says it is not there?" Mr Harding disagreed.
PA