Following Operation Demetrius (the mass arrest and internment of Irish nationalists), soldiers of the Parachute Regiment were involved in an action which came to be called the Ballymurphy massacre, in which 11 innocent civilians were shot dead and dozens wounded between 9 and 11 August 1971. At the Ballymurphy inquest in 2019, Sir Geoffrey Howlett, who in 1971 was a lieutenant colonel and commander of the Parachute Regiment's Second Battalion, gave evidence in which he acknowledged that "most, if not all" of those killed were not members of the IRA, and that a regimental note from 1971 indicating that the incident inflicted "severe casualties" on the IRA may have been a mistake. Howlett added that he had "enormous sympathy" toward the families of those killed.