A Derry hospital worker told the inquiry that early on Bloody Sunday morning, she was given a pointed warning by a British military policeman that her family should not attend the Civil Rights march.
Mrs Maureen Doherty worked on night shift at the cafeteria at Altnagelvin Hospital. She knew two military police officers as they had dinner there most nights. Because of anonymity rules being applied by the inquiry, Mrs Doherty was not allowed to give the names by which she knew these officers. They were designated only as 223 and 222. She believed 223 was a sergeant major in the military police and the more senior of the two. A few days before the march, he came into the canteen with a younger man, whom she had not seen before, and who is designated only as UNK (unknown) by the inquiry.
They were in uniform and she remembered that UNK asked her if she was going "on the walk on Sunday". She joked she would be "at the front line", although she had no intention of going because she would be on night shift on Saturday night. At 6 a.m. on Sunday, January 30th, the two men came into the canteen and 223 asked her to come outside for "a word".
"We stepped outside into the corridor. 223 asked `Have you got a family?'. I said `course I have'. 223 then said, `Well, don't let them go on the march tomorrow'. I asked why and he said `Because this is going to be one bloody Sunday'."
She was scared and angered, but she took it seriously. She got up at noon that day and told her children they were not going on the march.
There was an argument and eventually her husband decided to take two of their sons. They returned a short time later saying the army had refused to let them over the Craigavon bridge.
Mrs Doherty said for years she had not told anyone outside her family about this incident, but last month she gave permission to her solicitor to reveal her identity to the tribunal, and agreed to make a statement.
Mr Edmund Lawson QC said 223, his client, would deny any such conversation. His instructions were to put it to Ms Doherty that if something like this happened, 223 was not involved. Ms Doherty repeated it was 223 who had been there, and she knew him personally. Another witness yesterday described seeing "at least three puffs of smoke" from rifles pointing down into the Bogside from the City Walls. He realised soldiers were firing. Mr Thomas Mullarkey, an architect in Derry at the time, said he was "generally supportive of the civil rights movement".
"In some respects I saw the march on January 30th, 1972, as a last chance for a peaceful resolution to the problems that the local community in Derry faced." Mr Mullarkey was in Rossville Street when army personnel carriers drove in at speed. "I have a clear recollection of seeing soldiers jumping out . . . and immediately firing their rifles," he said.
As he walked home from the Bogside after the firing had died down, he saw a pick-up truck arrive and several men handing out guns from the back to people standing around. Another witness was questioned about a supplementary statement made in addition to an earlier witness statement he made 18 months ago.
Mr Charles McGill said after the shooting, he saw a civilian with a rifle beneath his coat in the Abbey Park area of the Bog side. The man asked where he could get a firing point, and Mr McGill told him to "F... off".
Mr McGill agreed he had told the inquiry's solicitors that he did not want to put this in his statement, because he lived in Derry, and because he did not want it to be used as an excuse to detract from the enormity of what he had seen that day, innocent people being shot down.