The company commander of the soldiers responsible for the shootings of 26 unarmed civilians in Derry on Bloody Sunday told the inquiry yesterday his soldiers did not tell him everything about the 15 shooting engagements they were involved in on the day.
Col Loden said that immediately after the shootings in the Bogside area of Derry on January 30th, 1972, which resulted in the deaths of 13 men, he compiled a list of the shots fired by members of the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, who had been deployed into the area.
He said he interviewed the soldiers in the back of his military Pig vehicle immediately after the killings. Col Loden said he had ordered the various platoon commanders to send to him all of the soldiers who had fired.
"My aim in this was not to provide a perfect chart for lawyers to pore over in years ahead. My aim was to give a report to my commanding officer because I was realising at the time that this was a very serious incident.
"It was not complete but it was my best effort at the time to make it complete," he told the inquiry.
Col Loden said at the time he believed his soldiers were doing their best to tell him accurately about all of the engagements they were involved in. He agreed with the inquiry's chairman, Lord Saville, that he was given "a far from complete picture of who shot and where" by the soldiers under his command.
Lord Saville asked when did he realise that the soldiers under his command had withheld information from him. "You did your best, you tell us, as the evening drew in, to get all the soldiers who had shot to come to you and tell you what they had done. You tell us you then wrote that down and others, from what you wrote down, compiled a list of engagements. But it surely, without interfering with the military police, became apparent over the following days and weeks that you had been told something which fell very far short of what had actually happened?"
Col Loden said he did not have an opportunity to carry out a further, more detailed, list because immediately after Bloody Sunday he and his soldiers were sent on operations to Belfast.
Meanwhile, the witness denied an assertion that he had lost control of the 75 soldiers under his command on Bloody Sunday. Barrister Mr Arthur Harvey, representing most of the victims' families, asked Col Loden how he claimed to have "firm control" of his soldiers when they did not tell him they had shot at civilians on the day.
"At this point it was not my position to exercise control. The platoon commanders and the section commanders are the people who are controlling their men at that moment," he said.