THE BLOODY SUNDAY INQUIRY/Day 229: One of the 14 civilians listed as having been shot and wounded on Bloody Sunday 30 years ago did not receive a gunshot wound during the Bogside killings in Derry in January 1972.
Dr Richard Shepherd, a forensic pathologist attached to the forensic medicine unit of St George's Hospital medical school, London, told the inquiry that a wound to the back of Mr Patrick McDaid, originally thought to have been caused by a high-velocity weapon, was most likely caused by a doctored rubber bullet fired by British soldiers in the Bogside on Bloody Sunday.
Dr Shepherd, who was engaged by the inquiry as an independent expert to re-examine the 30-year-old pathology and ballistic evidence, said yesterday that the likelihood that Mr McDaid was hit by a doctored rubber bullet "has to be the highest possibility".
He said he had also considered the possibility that the wound to Mr McDaid's back had been caused by either coins or by parts of batteries.He also ruled out the theory that Mr McDaid could have been hit by shrapnel from a nail bomb because he could "find nothing of the appearance of explosive injuries in the injury to the back of Patrick McDaid". Such injuries tended to be multiple lacerations, particularly if someone was in close range of a nail bomb.
However, while other possible causes of Mr McDaid's wound existed, "they were in the very, very low scale of likelihood".
In his evidence to the inquiry early last year, Mr McDaid said he was shot in the back as he dived for cover behind the Rossville Flats complex when the shooting started.
"As I hit the ground, someone else landed behind me, slightly to my left-hand side. He said to me: 'I think you're shot in the back.' I said: 'No, they've missed me.' I did not feel as though I had been shot. The man then put his hand on my back and showed me my blood on his hand. I panicked; fear went through me," he said in his statement on the 92nd day of the inquiry. He told the judges he was driven to Altnagelvin Hospital in an ambulance which contained a body. "When we got to casualty, I remember a doctor examining me and pressing my chest, asking: 'Which way did the bullets come out?' I did not know; all I knew was that I was hit in the back."