The death of General Sir Mike Jackson will not be mourned by the families of those killed on Bloody Sunday, the chair of the Bloody Sunday Trust has said.
Gen Jackson, who went on to become head of the Army, was a Parachute Regiment captain in Londonderry on 30 January 1972 when soldiers shot dead 13 civil rights demonstrators.
He died aged 80 on Tuesday.
The British Army said Gen Jackson would be “greatly missed, and long remembered”.,
Thirteen people were killed and 15 wounded on Bloody Sunday
Chair of the Bloody Sunday Trust Tony Doherty said “there will be no grieving the loss of this man” by the Bloody Sunday families.
“He wreaked havoc in Derry and elsewhere in the 1970s… there will be no mourning here,” he added.
In addition to the 13 people killed on Bloody Sunday, at least 15 others were injured.
Bloody Sunday is widely regarded as one of the darkest days of the Northern Ireland Troubles.
In 2010, the then Prime Minister David Cameron, made a public apology to Bloody Sunday victims following the publication of the findings of the Saville Inquiry.
In 2003, Gen Jackson gave evidence to the inquiry in relation to how he wrote a note regarding what soldiers said about why they had fired.
Saville said that the circumstances under which the list was compiled were “far from ideal”.
But the report added: “We accept Captain Jackson’s evidence of the purpose for which the list was initially prepared; and find nothing sinister in the fact that it did not include details such as the names of the soldiers and the number of rounds fired.”
Speaking on BBC Radio Ulster’s Good Morning Ulster Programme journalist Peter Taylor said the general was “perhaps the best known face of the army of his generation” who was “synonymous with the parachute regiment”.
“I was there on Bloody Sunday and discussed it with Mike Jackson several years later on the 10th or the 20th anniversary and I know how divisive a figure Mike became because he was there on Bloody Sunday as Colonel Wilford’s adjutant,” Mr Taylor said.
Gen Jackson was also a captain with the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment when 10 people were shot dead in Ballymurphy in Belfast in August 1971.
He later attended the Ballymurphy Inquest, where he denied there was a “cover-up” over the shootings.
It found in 2021 that the victims were “entirely innocent”.
Gen Jackson later rose to command the regiment’s First Battalion between 1984 and 1986.
Between 1995 and 1996 he commanded the UN peacekeeping force in Bosnia.
During the Kosovo campaign he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for leadership.
He became head of the British Army just a month before the Iraq war began, replacing Gen Sir Michael Walker.
