A man who saw several Bloody Sunday victims shot before his eyes and who was then arrested and beaten by paratroopers, said that he felt afterwards that he had to forgive the soldiers.
Mr Eamonn McAteer, a son of the late Nationalist MP for Foyle, Eddie McAteer, said it was clear to him that the soldiers had been used as blunt instruments in a political situation.
Mr McAteer, who was a 17year-old student at the time of the Bloody Sunday killings on January 30th, 1972, described going on the Civil Rights march with Shane Paul O'Doherty, who was later imprisoned for IRA activities.
In reply to Mr Christopher Clarke QC, counsel to the inquiry, the witness said he knew O'Doherty as a school friend but was himself a strong advocate of non-violence.
He pointed out that in a book published by O'Doherty in 1993, he was described by the author as having been a good friend "in spite of his [McAteer's] odious pacifist convictions". He thought that, as a friend at the time of Bloody Sunday, O'Doherty "had probably spared me a lot of the detail about what he was or was not involved in".
Mr McAteer described sheltering at the gable wall of Glenfada Park when the shooting began in Rossville Street. He saw three bodies at the rubble barricade and watched as "chips and bullets" came off the pavement around a man who was crawling slowly towards the safety of Rossville Flats. Three men who were with his group behind the gable wall then ran out across Glenfada Park, although people were saying, "Don't run".
Mr McAteer said he heard three shots and two men just dropped, one after the other.
He did not know what happened to the third one. A group of paratroopers then came around the corner holding their rifles and "ready for action".
The witness said: "They looked like loose cannons to me. They were casual but ready to kill and they did not seem to have a plan . . . As far as I was concerned I was glad to be arrested rather than killed."
He was taken with other prisoners on the back of a lorry to Fort George army base, where he had to run between two lines of soldiers to the door of a hangar. "One soldier hit me on the back of the head with a baton and then cursed me either because the baton broke or the strap broke. He gathered himself up and hit me again," said Mr McAteer.
"At the end of the line near the door was an RUC man and he tripped me as I came through the door." He could hear dogs barking and saw a soldier restraining a dog. The prisoners were put up against a wall and made to stand touching it with their fingertips, he said.
The witness said that afterwards he felt he could not blame the soldiers. "To me the barking dogs at Fort George represented the paras. They were trained to do certain things and were then released," he commented.