The allegations levelled against former British Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath about his knowledge of the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972 are "specious nonsense", his lawyer said yesterday.
Mr David Mackie QC said claims against Sir Edward (86) were "invariably false" and should never have been made.
Sir Edward has been challenged at the Bloody Sunday inquiry about how British soldiers came to shoot dead 13 unarmed Catholic men during a civil rights march and how much he knew about it beforehand.
One claim was that he tried to "browbeat" the chairman of the original inquiry, the then-Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, into reaching a particular conclusion about the causes of the tragedy.
Lord Widgery's 1972 report largely exonerated the British paratroopers leading to claims of a whitewash by survivors and families of the victims.
After re-examining Sir Edward yesterday, Mr Mackie told inquiry chairman Lord Saville that he had not had the opportunity to question witnesses who could support the various allegations made against his client.
"Very serious allegations have been made against our client. In our respectful submissions, they are invariably false and should not have been made. The highest any of them get on the scale, in our submission, is specious nonsense."
Sir Edward has spent eight days in the witness box and has insisted there was "not a scrap of truth" in the suggestion that he knew unarmed civilians could be caught up in shooting between IRA gunmen and British soldiers.
He has rejected suggestions that it was government policy to send troops into the Bogside; that troops were authorised to shoot troublemakers to control crowds, and that the blame for any casualties was intended to be passed on to the organisers and the terrorists.
He admitted yesterday to taking a closer interest in the situation in Northern Ireland between October 1971 and January 1972 because of its effect on other government policies, in particular taking Britain into the Common Market.
Sir Edward also accepted that during this period, the British government's attitude to illegal civil rights marches and escalating violence in the North hardened.
Mr Michael Lavery QC, said the victims' families whom he represented still had no satisfactory explanation or admission for what happened to their loved ones.
"The only person we can ask about this is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom," he said.
" . . . We leave it to to the tribunal to draw whatever inferences it considers appropriate from the evidence that has been given, from the questions that Sir Edward himself answered, from the information that he gave, from the questions that he refused to answer and from the documents and from the omissions from the documents."
The hearing was adjourned until Monday. - (PA)
A minute's silence is expected to be held at the Bloody Sunday memorial in the Bogside area of Derry tomorrow and a commemorative march at the scene of the shootings on Sunday.