A witness claimed yesterday that a paratrooper, while holding him at gunpoint, described in detail how he had killed four people in Belfast and said he intended to shoot him also.
Mr George Nelis said he completely believed what the soldier told him and he was certain he was going to be killed imminently. The alleged incident happened after Mr Nelis had been taken with other men from his mother's house in Chamberlain Street, where two of the people wounded on Bloody Sunday were being treated and were awaiting ambulances.
All the men were taken to nearby waste ground and ordered to crouch down facing a wall and keep their hands above their heads while awaiting an army truck to take them to a detention centre.
Mr Nelis said a soldier with a Scottish accent, alleged to be the one designated by the code number Inquiry 12, came up behind him and told him he had been wounded in Belfast but had got his revenge by killing four Irishmen.
"He told me how he had shot two of them in the head, one of them in the chest and one of them in the balls. I remember him saying how he had enjoyed watching the man who he had shot in the balls dying slowly. He also said that I would not see my wife again, that he would shoot me that night."
The witness described witnessing ill-treatment of prisoners after he was taken to the Fort George army barracks in Derry. When a man with a badly gashed hand asked a "sergeant type" for a plaster for his wound, the soldier walked over "and hit him hard at least two times in the face . . . the man dropped to the ground."
Mr Nelis said that after he was released he went next day to an RUC station to make a formal complaint. However, the detective who took a statement from him, Sgt David Dorsett, was killed some time later by a booby-trap bomb under his car, "and after that happened I decided there was no point in taking the matter any further - I was sick of all the violence."
Mr Nelis's sisters, Anna and Margaret, also gave evidence about incidents in the Chamberlain Street house.