Bloody Sunday Inquiry: A former lieutenant in the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment who fired four shots from his SLR rifle on Bloody Sunday, denied yesterday that he targeted and wounded a 38-year-old mother of 14.
Peggy Deery was one of 13 civilians wounded in Derry's Bogside in January 1972 when paratroopers opened fire during an illegal civil rights march and rally. Thirteen other unarmed civilians were killed.
Ms Deery was shot in the left thigh in the vicinity of the car-park of the Rossville Flats into which the former soldier, known as Soldier N, admitted firing.
Soldier N told the inquiry into the Bloody Sunday killings that the person he shot was a man who was about to throw a nail-bomb in the direction of an army personnel carrier.
He denied an assertion by Mr Barry MacDonald QC, who represents most of the families of the Bloody Sunday victims, that instead of shooting a nail-bomber, he in fact shot Ms Deery.
"The person I shot was definitely a man," he said. "There was no doubt then or now, in my mind," he told the inquiry's three judges.
Asked by Mr MacDonald if, after realising that he had shot a woman, he had gone into shock and retreated into a personnel carrier, Soldier N said: "Please stop trying to put words into my mouth. I did not shoot a woman".
The witness said that he did nothing on Bloody Sunday that caused him to feel any sort of guilt. Soldier N, who fired the first army shots in the Bogside on Bloody Sunday after the paratroopers had been deployed into the area, also denied Mr MacDonald's assertion that three warning shots he fired in Chamberlain Street "could have sparked off the entire episode".
Soldier N told the inquiry that he fired these shots over the heads of a running crowd because he feared they were going to move in behind his men.
"When I fired those shots I had no doubt in my mind that that was the only effective way to stop a very dangerous situation becoming even more dangerous," he said.
Meanwhile, in two reserved rulings, the inquiry's judges have granted an application for both screening and anonymity to a former military intelligence agent known by the pseudonym "Martin Ingram", who is due to give evidence to the inquiry next month.
The former agent, who was a soldier in the Force Research Unit at the time of Bloody Sunday, has claimed in a statement to the inquiry that successive British governments have known that an allegation that Martin McGuinness fired a shot on Bloody Sunday was untrue.
"Martin Ingram's" application was supported by the current Defence Secretary, Mr Geoff Hoon, who in a letter to the inquiry said that terrorists would be "keen to interrogate, torture and murder Martin Ingram" if his identity became known to them.
The judges also ruled that a former director of intelligence, who now lives abroad and who is unwilling to come to the UK to give his evidence, may do so via a video link next month.
The inquiry continues today.