A witness who was a schoolboy when he watched from a bedroom window as two men were cut down by bullets just outside his house, began his crucial evidence to the inquiry yesterday.
Mr John (Seβn) Carr, now an SDLP councillor, was aged 13 when he watched a deadly pageant unfold in the Abbey Park/Glenfada Park area of the Bogside on January 30th, 1972.
Banned by his parents from taking part in the Civil Rights march on Bloody Sunday, the teenager was put with his brothers and sisters in an upstairs bedroom in the family home at Abbey Park when it became evident that there were casualties in the area.
He said he had a clear view from the window through an alleyway in front of his house into the Glenfada Park North car-park. After a burst of gunfire, a group of people ran out from this alley and he could see a man lying just inside the courtyard.
He then saw a soldier enter his field of vision, and as he ran past the body of the man, the soldier put his foot on the prone man and ran on.
The soldier ran through the alleyway and stopped. All the people who had come through before that ran away, except for one man who stood on a row of steps on the street outside Mr Carr's house.
This man put his hands up and looked at the soldier, who raised his rifle to his shoulder and shot the man. The man fell and rolled onto his back, and the witness said he saw him bless himself with his right hand.
"I could not believe what I had seen. There was absolutely no reason for it," he said. "The man had been doing nothing and had his hands clearly up in the air."
Shortly afterwards the schoolboy saw another man run towards the man who had been shot. The soldier was still in position, and the second man was shot as he reached the first victim. The soldier then turned and went back into Glenfada Park.
Mr Carr gave similar evidence to the Widgery Inquiry in 1972, when he said he knew the two victims to have been Gerry McKinney and Willie McKinney, and the man lying in Glenfada Park to have been Jim Wray. He will continue his evidence to the present inquiry this morning.
Earlier yesterday, Mr Danny Gillespie gave evidence that he was shot by a soldier in Glenfada Park.
The bullet grazed his scalp and he fell face down. As he regained his senses, he said, two youths were asking him if he was all right and were helping him to his feet.
At this point he heard a further shot from the soldier, and one of the youths groaned and fell on top of him. Mr Gillespie said that he disentangled himself and ran away.
The witness said he did not go to hospital as he was frightened of being arrested if he did so. As a result,
Mr Gillespie's name has not previously been included in the official lists of those wounded on Bloody Sunday.
Another witness, Hugh Martin Gallagher, described how he was arrested near his home outside the Bogside early on the aftenoon of Bloody Sunday.
He was aged 15 at the time, and he was charged with riotous behaviour on the evidence of a soldier identified as Lance Corporal 104 - a charge which a court subsequently dismissed after hearing independent evidence rebutting it. In reply to Mr Seamus Treacy QC, Mr Gallagher agreed that his present evidence amounted to saying that Soldier 104 had perjured himself in that court case.