21
McCANN AND OTHERS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT
newspaper report had mentioned the detail), he supposed that he must have
heard it in the street. When asked at the inquest why he had made up the
statement, he referred to previous illness, pressure at work and the desire to
stop being telephoned by a person who was asking him to give an interview
to the media.
88. Miss Treacy claimed that she was in the path leading from the tunnel
and that she was between Savage and the first of the soldiers as the firing
began, though not in the line of fire. She recalled that Savage was running
and thought that he was shot in the back as he faced towards the tunnel. She
did not see him shot on the ground. Her account contained a number of
apparent discrepancies with the evidence of other witnesses; she said the
soldier shot with his left hand whereas he was in fact right-handed; no one
else described Savage as running; and she described the body as falling with
feet towards the nearby tree rather than his head which was the way all the
other witnesses on the scene described it. The Coroner in his summing-up
thought that it might be possible to reconcile her account by the fact that
Miss Treacy may have not been looking at Savage as he spun round to face
the soldiers and that by the time she did look he was spinning round towards
the tunnel in reaction to the firing. 89. Mr Bullock and his wife stated that a
man pushed past them as they walked up Smith Dorrien Avenue to the
junction and that they saw that he had a gun down the back of his trousers.
They saw him meet up with another man, also with a gun in his trousers, on
the corner of the alleyway to the Landport tunnel. The men were watching
the shooting outside the Shell garage and, when the shooting stopped, they
turned and ran out of sight. After that there was another long burst of
shooting.
90. Another witness, Mr Jerome Cruz, however, who was in a car in the
traffic queue in Smith Dorrien Avenue and who remembered seeing
Mr Bullock dive for cover, cast doubts on his version. In particular, he
stated that Mr Bullock was not near the end of Smith Dorrien Avenue but
further away from the Shell garage (more than 100 yards away) and that he
had dived for cover as soon as there was the sound of shooting. He agreed
that he had also seen persons crouching looking from behind a wall at the
entrance to the pathway leading to the tunnel.
13. Events following the shootings
91. At 15.47-15.48 hours, E received a message in the operations room
that apprehension of the three suspects had taken place. It was not clear at
that stage whether they had been arrested or shot. By 16.00 to 16.05 hours,
the report was received in the operations room that the three suspects had
been shot.
92. At 16.05-16.06 hours, Soldier F handed a form to the Commissioner
returning control. According to the transcript of the evidence given by the
Commissioner at the inquest, this form addressed to him by Soldier F stated