A witness described yesterday how he peered through the flap of a letterbox on Bloody Sunday and saw soldiers shoot three men in succession.
Mr Joseph Doherty told how he took refuge in a house in Joseph Place, south of Rossville Flats, and when he looked through the front-door letterbox he could see soldiers taking up firing positions.
A youth walked out from behind the rubble barricade in Rossville Street and leaned down as if to pick something up. As he straightened up, shots rang out and the youth fell. A second, older man then walked out and bent down over the youth, and he, too, was shot.
Then he saw a man he now knew to have been Barney McGuigan walk out from a group sheltering at a gable wall. A soldier across the street dropped to his knee, aimed and fired one shot, and Mr McGuigan fell to the ground.
A retired headmaster, Mr Niall McCafferty, said he was standing in Rossville Street with his wife and some friends when armoured cars raced into the street and soldiers jumped out.
"At first I thought I had nothing to fear from the soldiers, as I had not been participating in any rioting and was just talking to friends", he said. "However, after about two seconds I realised that I might have something to fear from the charging soldiers. I turned and ran south towards the rubble barricade."
He helped two elderly women across the barricade and then became aware that live bullets were being fired from the general direction of the area where the army vehicles had stopped.
Mr McCafferty said that as he crawled behind a low wall he became aware of more shooting, this time from the direction of the city walls.
The witness said that at that time he was on secondment to a joint project under the auspices of the NUU and the Community Relations Commission which was targeted at young adults who were above school-leaving age but were unemployed. Some of these young people had become involved in rioting.
The project he was involved in was aimed at trying to instil some sense of their own value in these young people. "People like myself had warned the authorities for many years that there had to be an explosion - that the majority of young people could not live with hopeless prospects . . . that there was going to be an explosion and somebody would employ them in negative ways eventually."
He said that when the civil rights marches began they were a protest against this social injustice and neglect, and young people took part in them.
Mr McCafferty also said he remembered John Young, one of the youths shot dead on Bloody Sunday, who had been a pupil in his school, St Joseph's. He had given him career advice and helped him get employment, and he had been told subsequently that he was an outstanding success.
Another witness, Mr Philip McGuinness, said that he saw blue flashes and puffs of smoke coming from slits in the side of the first armoured car which was driven into the Bogside.
The inquiry continues today.