The amateur photographer who captured some of the key images of the Bloody Sunday shootings told the inquiry yesterday he believed a paratrooper had deliberately fired a shot at him on the day.
Mr Robert White's series of pictures showing the entry of British troops and armoured vehicles into the Bogside are vital to the inquiry's efforts to establish what happened on January 30th, 1972, when 13 civilians were shot dead after a Civil Rights march.
In particular, his photographs fix the time of the paratroopers' arrival in the Bogside at 4.10 p.m. - the time on the Guildhall clock seen in the background in pictures of the first armoured personnel carriers leading the troops in.
Mr White told how he took photographs near the rubble barricade in Rossville Street and, although there were two or three bodies on the ground, he thought they had been hit by rubber bullets: "I didn't imagine for a moment that they were seriously hurt or shot," he said.
However, immediately after he took a picture of a running man who appeared to have been injured - as he thought then - by a rubber bullet, Mr White said he looked for the soldier who had fired at this man and saw a soldier at the corner of Rossville Flats.
"I saw him put his rifle up to his shoulder and aim in my direction," he said. He and a man beside him both dropped down below a wall and immediately he heard "the whine of a bullet as it passed straight above me".
Mr White, who was aged 35 at the time, said he was a keen amateur photographer and had taken his camera with him on several previous marches. He confirmed that shortly after Bloody Sunday, at the request of someone whose identity he could not remember, he had destroyed several photographs he had taken of the early rioting in William Street on the day.
This was because the faces of rioters could be seen in them and he did not want them to be used in evidence to jail people who might be accused of rioting.
Mr White said that it was only after Bloody Sunday that he discovered the real content and significance of the photographs he had taken. Another witness described how youths behind the rubble barricade in Rossville Street began to throw stones when soldiers entered the street but the distance was too great and the stones had no effect.
Mr Jack Nash, who is now a regional secretary of SIPTU, based in Dublin, said some of the soldiers started shooting rubber bullets. "We were well out of the way and you could clearly see the rubber bullets that were coming down," he said.
"It was almost a surreal scene. Everyone was standing straight up facing the soldiers and what was happening was not really close to a riot; it was more of a stand-off."
When a youth suddenly fell behind the barricade, the witness said, he thought he had either been hit by a rubber bullet or had tripped or fallen. People could not believe that he had been shot by a live bullet. He now knew this youth to have been 17-year-old Michael Kelly, one of those killed.
Mr Paul McGeady, who was also behind the rubble barricade, said up to a dozen people moved forward over the barricade to try to rescue a youth who had been struck and knocked down by a soldier on waste ground near the flats.
As one of the youths in the rescue group climbed to the top of the barricade he was suddenly thrown violently back wards.
"I knew immediately that he had been shot, even though I had not heard a shot being fired," the witness said.
Mr Thomas Carlin described how he saw smoke, which he thought was gun smoke, billowing from an army sangar on the Derry Walls as he sheltered near Free Derry Corner when the shooting started.
Mr Carlin also described an incident later in Barrack Street, outside the Bogside, when soldiers stopped a car which was being driven at speed with a white flag out the window, and which he assumed was heading for the hospital.
He said he saw a soldier armed with a pistol pull a man out of one of the car doors. "He was holding the man's hair with his left hand and . . . in his right hand he held the pistol to the man's head and fired two shots," the witness said.
"It looked to me like an execution but I do not think the shots were fired at the man's head because I did not see the head move . . ." At that moment, he added, another soldier called, "There's another yobbo" - and gestured towards him.
The witness said that, as he turned on his heels and ran back in the direction he had come, he heard the soldier with the pistol shout "Stop! Stop!" He then heard two more shots fired but he was quickly out of sight of the soldiers.
Mr Peter Clarke QC, for a number of soldiers, put it to the witness that no pistol was fired at the army barrier in question, but Mr Carlin maintained he was absolutely certain of what he had seen.
"It's my enduring memory of Bloody Sunday - the image has stayed with me ever since," he said.
The inquiry will resume on Monday.