Nicola Tallent

They used to be very busy, buzzy places with phones ringing everywhere.

And it felt like a proper newsroom that day.

I remember everybody's phone was going, people were hearing little bits about it.

It was the news was starting to break about it.

And of course, we were there sitting in the office with this photo.

There's that sort of news sense in you that you want to run this.

Yes.

And at the time, we weren't putting stuff up online.

This would have been held for the paper on the Sunday.

And this is a Friday afternoon.

We had something really special here.

But we also, I think, knew the guards were going to be desperate for that picture because they were two gunmen running from a scene of a crime.

So it was a very compromised situation and there was a bit of arguments going on.

And there was a, you know, voices were raised.

From my memory, as the afternoon went on and, you know, I was talking to contacts and to other people who were involved in crime journalism, etc.

It became apparent that there were no guards at the weigh-in.

That in actual fact, the guards didn't seem to be there at all.

They were called literally by the hotel and had arrived in response to what had already gone on.

Of course, David Byrne had been shot dead in the...

In the reception of the hotel we were getting photographs in later in the day which showed a very shocked looking Liam Byrne standing outside the hotel, his hands in his pockets.