A claim in yesterday's Observer newspaper that the British security service agent who said Mr Martin McGuinness had fired the first shot on Bloody Sunday was a "known liar", "totally vindicates" Mr McGuinness, a spokesman for him said yesterday.
According to the report, by David Shayler, formerly of MI5, the agent was "terminated" as an intelligence source. The information will be brought to the attention of the Saville inquiry today.
In December, the Saville inquiry was told that Mr McGuinness, Minister of Education in Northern Ireland, "seemed to have it on his conscience" that he had fired the first shot on the day when 13 civilians were shot dead in Derry in 1972. The evidence came from documents detailing a conversation between a security service officer and an agent codenamed Infliction.
"I discussed him [Infliction] with the other MI5 officers in T8 branch [counter-IRA]," Mr Shayler writes. "They agreed . . . He was not trusted."
