A witness yesterday described how he was being "throttled" by a soldier in Fort George army base in Derry on Bloody Sunday when a senior RUC officer intervened and threw his attacker to the ground.
Mr Maurice McColgan, who was 18 at the time, gave a vivid description of a terrifying ordeal while in military custody, including having to run the gauntlet of baton-wielding paratroopers with other arrested civilians.
After the Civil Rights march, he saw Saracen armoured personnel carriers enter Rossville Street and one turned on to waste ground near the high flats. A paratrooper jumped out and ran at a man named William McCloskey with a raised baton. Mr McColgan said Mr McCloskey "took on the paratrooper and felled him with a punch".
Mr McColgan and Mr McCloskey shortly afterwards carried a wounded man to a house in Chamberlain Street where first aid personnel tended to him. Paratroopers entered the house and rounded up "every able-bodied person" there.
With 20 to 40 other civilians, Mr McColgan was marched away and taken in an army truck to Fort George. There they had to pass between two lines of paratroopers who were armed with batons and struck the men as they ran with their arms up to protect their heads. Mr McColgan described being held in a barbed wire compound within a large building, and how a soldier identified him to the RUC as a rioter, although he had not thrown stones or participated in the disturbances.
After some time tea was brought for the detainees in plastic cups, but he did not get a cup. A soldier had put one of these cups on the ground for his Alsatian dog to drink from, and then handed him the cup told him to drink from it. "I told him I would not drink it, screw ed the cup up and threw it on the floor," said Mr McColgan.
Shortly afterwards, the soldier took him to the toilet in another building. "I felt a heavy blow . . . across the back of my neck and shoulder," he said.
"I turned round quickly and the same English soldier was there . . . he pushed me up against the wall and was throttling me with his baton and he said, `If you ever do that about my dog again I will blow your f . . . ing head off'."
An RUC officer appeared, the witness said. He seemed to be a senior officer because he wore gold braid on his jacket. "He dragged the soldier off me and threw the soldier down on the floor and threw the soldier's baton at him," said Mr McColgan. "The soldier got up and quickly left the room."
He was released later and, as he was leaving, he heard a commotion. An RUC officer told him the regular soldiers were "having a big row" with the paras because of what the paras had done that day.
Another witness, Mr Patrick Anthony Clarke, described how he saw a soldier peer briefly around a corner in Chamberlain Street, and then a rifle appeared around the corner and up to six shots were discharged. "He was firing blindly." Days later, his wife found a bullet hole in the sheepskin jacket he had been wearing on the day.
Mr Clarke told how he lay on the ground near Rossville Flats during the later shooting and heard an English voice speak through a loud hailer "ordering us not to move or we would be dead". He saw soldiers pick up two bodies off the rubble barricade and throw them head first into the back of a Saracen apc.
He put his coat over the body of Barney McGuigan, until a woman threw a blanket down from the flats to cover the body.