The Bloody Sunday Inquiry heard yesterday that two warning shots fired into a wall by one of the first paratroop officers to enter the Bogside may have given rise to a radio message from another unit which relayed the first report to headquarters of shooting after the operation began.
Mr Christopher Clarke QC said that Lieut N was the commander of the Mortar Platoon of Support Company of 1 Para and was in the first armoured car to enter the Bogside.
This officer had described in evidence to the Widgery Inquiry how he fired two shots into a wall above the heads of a crowd that surged towards him shortly after he left the vehicle.
Counsel said it might be that Lieut N's first two shots were the subject of a message that appeared in the transcript of the army radio communications that afternoon. At 16.15 hours a message is recorded from the first Battalion of the Coldstream Guards, whose call sign was 76.
The message said: "Zero, this is 76. Two high-velocity shots heard in the area of Free . . . er, Rossville flats. People are lying on the ground now there. Over." Mr Clarke introduced to the inquiry a series of photographs, from press photographers and other sources, depicting the scenes in the Rossville Street/Rossville Flats area at the time the paratroops launched their operation.
He noted that: "In none of these photographs is there any indication that I have been able to detect that the people shown in the photographs at the barricades were bearing arms, as opposed to stones."
Counsel said that what was highly controversial was the question of when and how firing of live rounds began.
"An important but by no means an overriding question is who fired the first shot," he added. "Another is to determine whether, as the army have always contended, soldiers of the Mortar Platoon came under considerable fire from the direction of the Rossville flats and elsewhere, such firing including bullets and nails, acid and petrol bombs, or whether, on the contrary, they did not come under fire at all, or at least did not do so until they themselves had started firing."
He suggested it was appropriate to summarise the evidence of the majority of those witnesses who were Derry residents as being to the effect that the first shots were those fired by the paratroops.
The Derry civilians' evidence also was that, "with limited exceptions such as the gunman seen by Father Daly and others and perhaps someone firing from the fifth floor of the flats, no one saw or says that he saw a weapon fired by or carried by a civilian or heard a nailbomb.
"I exclude from that summary the IRA men who drove down from the Creggan at a late stage," Mr Clarke added.
This did not mean, he said, that the evidence of shots having been fired at the army was confined to army witnesses; on the contrary, there was a substantial body of evidence from journalists to the effect that the army was fired on.
The inquiry adjourned until this morning.