A retired RUC Constable told the Bloody Sunday Inquiry today that he heard
machine gun fire from a weapon of the type used by the IRA, before soldiers opened fire killing 13 people on the civil rights march in Derry 30 years ago.
However James Penney, who unlike many other police witnesses did not seek to be screened from the view of the public in the Derry Guildhall, admitted he may have been wrong when he made a statement four days after the carnage on January 30, 1972, that he also heard the sound of three nail bombs exploding.
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He said he had been shown his statement of February 1972 in which he had said he heard the nail bombs exploding. He no longer had such recollection and added: "They may not necessarily have been nail bombs."
Mr Penney said that the only thing which stuck in his mind to this day was the sound of Thompson Sub Machine Gun fire followed by high velocity fire.
He had been surprised when he heard the TSMG and did not immediately think there had been a major confrontation. "My first thought was that a police vehicle or an Army vehicle had been ambushed, as the TSMG was a weapon that would have been used by the IRA at the time."
Mr Penney, who was on duty in the Diamond in Derry and well away from the march, said the Thompson had a distinctive sound "like a slow stutter".
"On the day the weapon fired two or three slow bursts of gunfire over a short space of time. I recognised the sound as coming from a TSMG."
After the machine gun fire came the sound of high velocity fire, he said. "I assumed that the Army was firing this, as this was the sound produced by the kind of rifles that the Army tended to use."
Under questioning by Michael Mansfield, QC for the family of one of those killed, he accepted that all police radio transmissions on the day had been recorded and that no-one else had reported hearing either nail bombs exploding or Thompson Sub Machine Gun fire.
He said he could not explain that but refused to say he had been wrong about the machine gun fire.
"I heard it at the time," he insisted.
PA