Parachute Regiment commander on Bloody Sunday Derek Wilford has died

The retired British Army officer died at the age of 90 on Friday in Belgium where he had been living for the past 40 years.

On January 30, 1972, men under his command shot 13 unarmed civilians dead during an anti-internment protest in the Bogside in what became known as Bloody Sunday.

A 14th victim died of his injuries. Twenty-six people were shot by British paratroopers that day.

Tony Doherty, Chair of the Bloody Sunday Trust, whose father was murdered on Bloody Sunday, said that ‘the passing of Derek Wilford, while felt by his family, will not be mourned by the families of the innocent men and boys whose lives were taken by armed British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday’.

"Colonel Wilford lived in a constant state of denial, never once accepting any measure of responsibility for his actions on that fateful day.

"History, though, will ensure that his actions led directly to the deaths of many innocent people which, in turn, led to years of conflict and hardship for our communities. He left a terrible legacy and will rightly be remembered for that,” said Mr. Doherty.

Jackie Duddy (17), Michael Kelly (17), Hugh Gilmour (17), William Nash (19), John Young (17), Michael McDaid (20), Kevin McElhinney (17), Jim Wray (22), Gerry McKinney (35), Gerald Donaghey (17), Patrick Doherty (31), Bernard McGuigan (41), William McKinney (26) and John Johnston (59) were fatally wounded by Wilford’s soldiers on Bloody Sunday.

On January 24, 1972, Major General Robert Ford, Commander of Land Forces in the North, appointed Wilford to lead a proposed arrest operation after the RUC advised a non-violent Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) demonstration against internment was set to take place in Derry the following week.

In 2010 Mark Saville’s report into the events of Bloody Sunday concluded that Wilford, then a Lieutenant Colonel and the Commanding Officer of 1 PARA, should not have sent his soldiers into the Bogside and in doing so had disobeyed the orders of Brigadier Patrick MacLellan who was the Commander of the 8th Infantry Brigade, the Army brigade in charge of the Derry area at the time.

The report stated: “Colonel Wilford should have ordered his soldiers to stay in and around William Street and the northern end of Rossville Street.

"Instead, he sent them into the Bogside, where they chased people down Rossville Street, into the car park of the Rossville Flats, into Glenfada Park North and as far as Abbey Park.”

‘My mother started screaming Willie, Willie, Willie...I’ll never forget that’

It concluded: “In our view Colonel Wilford should not have sent soldiers of Support Company into the Bogside for the following reasons: because in doing so he disobeyed the orders given by Brigadier MacLellan; because his soldiers, whose job was to arrest rioters, would have no or virtually no means of identifying those who had been rioting from those who had simply been taking part in the civil rights march; and because he should not have sent his soldiers into an unfamiliar area which he and they regarded as a dangerous area, where the soldiers might come under attack from republican paramilitaries, in circumstances where the soldiers’ response would run a significant risk that people other than those engaging the soldiers with lethal force would be killed or injured by Army gunfire.”

In the immediate aftermath of the slayings seven Derry priests Rev. Anthony Mulvey, Rev. Edward Daly, Rev. G. McLaughlin, Rev. J. Carolan, Rev. Denis Bradley, Rev. Michael McIvor, and Rev. Thomas O’Gara issued a statement condemning Wilford and Ford.

‘How many brothers do you have?’ ‘I have two.’ ‘You have only one now’

The ‘Journal carried the statement under the banner headline, ‘IT WAS WILFUL MURDER, SAY PRIESTS’ in its edition of Tuesday, February 1, 1972.

“We accuse the soldiers of shooting indiscriminately into a fleeing crowd, of gloating over casualties, of preventing medical and spiritual aid reaching some of the dying.

“It is untrue that shots were fired at the troops in Rossville Street before they attacked. It is untrue that any of the dead or wounded that we attended were armed. We make this statement in view of the distorted and indeed conflicting reports put out by army officers.

“We deplore the action of the army and Government in employing a unit such as the paratroopers who were in Derry yesterday. These men are trained criminals. They differ from terrorists only in the veneer of respectability that a uniform gives them,” the priests stated.

The first draft of the history of one of Derry’s darkest ever days

An account of events entitled ‘The March That Ended in a River of Blood’ described Bloody Sunday as a ‘day of the deepest shame’ for the British Army and 1 PARA.

“As more eye-witness accounts of the holocaust that was the Bogside of Sunday, January 30, 1972, became available, deeper was the conviction that it was a day of the deepest shame for the British Army and for the soldiers of the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment in particular.

“All the protestations of official British Army spokesmen and of commanders on the ground that the army opened fire only after they had been shot at by snipers from the high flats in Rossville Street were swamped by the deluge of opinions of on-the-spot observers, including several priests, that the paratroopers raced into the Bogside, shooting as they went at anti-internment demonstrators fleeing before them and at other demonstrators moving towards a meeting about to begin at Free Derry Corner,” this paper reported.

In 1973 Wilford was made an Officer of the British Empire in the British queen’s New Year Honours.

Timeline from Civil Rights to Saville’s report in Derry