Asked if he could recall any incidents when those they shot dead could have been arrested, he said: “No not at all. Two of the ones I was on they were firing at us when we got out of cars, we were under fire.
“We were absolutely professional and highly trained and if your premise is true then every one of the guys we arrested would be dead, so its not true.”
George Simm was the SAS commander in charge when his unit killed three IRA men in an ambush at Drumnakilly near Omagh in 1988.
The gang which included brothers Gerard, 29, and Martin Harte, 23, together with their brother-in-law Brian Mullan, 26, had planned to kill an off duty UDR man while he was driving a coal lorry.
But the SAS unit had been tipped off about the attack and were waiting for the gang. Simm posed as the lorry driver and pretended he had broken down at the side of the road.
“I heard the car coming and could see it was a Sierra and suddenly out of the back window was a hood with a gun and he fired a burst at me which forced me to take evasive action,” he said.
“The car was speeding towards me and there were bullets flying everywhere and I went around the back of the truck, and I know it was Martin Harte who was firing under the truck.
“I could feel them and the bullets were flying into the hedge where the other guys were and I thought some of them may have been hit but they weren’t.”
He said the car stopped and one of the other IRA men ran around the back of the truck “to kill him”, and then the soldiers opened fire.
He added it was all over in “three or four seconds” and “that was the end of the operation”.