THE TIMES
WEDNESDAY, 25TH
SEPTEMBER 2002

Bloody Sunday officer testifies

BY DAVID LISTER, IRELAND CORRESPONDENT

ONE of Britain’s most respected military strategists was forced to defend his assertion that all insurgents should be “exterminated” as he was questioned yesterday over the fatal shootings of 14 civilians by paratroopers on Bloody Sunday.

General Sir Frank Kitson was commander of the Army’s 39 Brigade in Belfast at the time of Bloody Sunday in January 1972.

He wrote in 1989 that it was “illogical” for insurgents to expect “anything other than total extermination, by any legal means”.

He distanced himself from his hardline comments yesterday and said that his views had nothing to do with the Army’s planning ahead of Bloody Sunday, in which he claimed that he was not involved.

Sir Frank became the first officer to give evidence on its 237th day of hearings and its first day in London, where the inquiry has been installed in Westminster’s Central Hall at a cost of £15 million.

He denied that his expertise in counter-insurgency meant that he would have been involved in the planning and dismissed as “total rubbish” claims that the Army’s strategy was to draw the IRA into a confrontation with soldiers by attacking civilians.

According to a draft article written shortly after the shootings for The Sunday Times, but which was never published, the plan was worked out “on lines of thinking propounded by Brigadier Frank Kitson, counter-insurgency expert”.

Sir Frank, 75, served in Kenya, Cyprus and Malaysia and earned a reputation as a counter-insurgency expert after his 1971 book Low Intensity Operations. He said that he was never asked for his views on security policy in Northern Ireland outside Belfast. “I knew nothing about the political decisions which governed security policy and very little about the situation elsewhere in the Province,” he said.

The inquiry continues.