A 12-year-old boy watched three fleeing men being shot, moments before six bullets were fired by soldiers through the window of his family's firstfloor flat in the Bogside.
In a tape recording played to the inquiry yesterday, the pandemonium in the flat was heard and, blaring on a television set in the background, a recruiting advertisement for the British army was audible.
The shootings witnessed by the boy, John McCrudden, in all three key areas - the Rossville Flats car-park, the barricade in Rossville Street and Glenfada Park - were described by him yesterday.
Mr McCrudden, now aged 41, told how his mother came out with a stick to take him away from the scene of the early rioting in William Street. Back in their flat, he had a view of much of what happened after the paratroopers arrived. He saw a soldier in the carpark use his rifle "like a baseball bat", holding it by the barrel and clubbing people who were running past. He then saw a soldier shoot a man carrying a bottle who turned and faced them.
From a window on the other side of the flat, overlooking Rossville Street, he saw two bodies behind the makeshift barricade and "lumps and dust" flying from the barricade as an older man wearing a cap crouched there and shouted for help.
Then he saw three men across the street, standing at a gable wall at Glenfada Park, apparently trying to decide where to go as firing continued and lumps flew off a corner wall beside them. "They began to run west towards the gap . . . between Glenfada Park North and Glenfada Park South," he said.
"They were all shot as they ran along . . . I did not see who fired the shots." He said the men fell in sequence. One appeared to be shot twice - once as he was on his feet trying to open the latch of a garden gate, and then a second time, whereupon "he buckled and fell to the floor". The witness added: "I am certain that these men had no weapons; they had nothing at all in their hands."
An Italian photographer, Mr Fulvio Grimaldi, and Ms Susan North came to the flat, apparently because there was a telephone there. As Mr Grimaldi took photographs, bullets came through the window and hit the back wall. They shattered, and fragments went everywhere, he said. "The room was a wreck. Splinters flew off the wardrobe and there were small holes and burn marks on the ceiling, fragments of metal everywhere." He recalled his mother "shouting furiously at the journalist because she felt it was his fault that the shots had been fired".
At this stage, part of a tape recording made at the time by Ms North was played to the inquiry. Shots were heard and various voices shouting: "Get down. Get on the floor, they are firing at our windows" and "On your belly; crawl over there . . " Somebody calls: "Can you turn the television off? . . oh, it's in there, no, leave it, it doesn't matter . . . stay in the bathroom . . . keep your head down."
The sound of a television is audible in the background, and at this point the voice-over of an advertisement for the British army can be heard saying: "The army offers you very good pay right from the start, and a whole lot more."
Another witness, Ms Antoinette Coyle, who was 17 on Bloody Sunday and attended the march in uniform as a member of the Knights of Malta firstaid volunteers, also described seeing a soldier hold the barrel of his rifle with his hands and swing it like a club. He went to the first person who was running past and tried to hit them, said the witness. "This was a young girl . . . He hit [her] with the butt of the rifle in the middle of her back. He had aimed for her head but she ducked at the last moment."
The inquiry continues today.