A witness who was 10 years old on Bloody Sunday told the inquiry yesterday a bullet hit the balcony railings on Rossville flats beside him as he leaned over to watch what was happening in the courtyard below.
Mr Peter Hutton, the youngest eyewitness yet to give evidence at the inquiry, said he was watching people running in panic across the courtyard when he became aware of a soldier running into the area.
The soldier pointed his rifle towards a low wall behind which many people were hiding and to which people were still heading. The witness heard two or three shots, and there was more panic in the courtyard.
The soldier then looked up in his direction and pointed his rifle towards him, "and as he did so, the railings made an almighty din . . . There was a sound like a reverberating bell".
The witness either fell back or stepped back, and quickly moved away to a sheltered spot beside a refuse chute in the block. He hid for some time and then went down to the street where he saw the body of a man.
Mr Hutton said he later went back to the balcony and found an indentation in a vertical railing only inches from where he had been. "It is my belief that the indentation had been caused by a bullet fired at me by the soldier I had seen," he said.
Mr Edmund Lawson QC, for the soldiers, asked him how anybody else looking out of the flats could have missed seeing this soldier standing by himself and firing.
The witness replied: "I was a 10-year-old boy. I am not sitting here making up stories. I am saying what I saw and that is the truth."
Another witness, Mr James McGeehan, who was 17 at the time, said when he was in the courtyard he saw two soldiers standing beside each other, one holding a self-loading rifle and the other a bullet gun.
He heard the cracks of live bullets coming from the rifle. "I clearly recall that the soldier with the riot gun was restraining the soldier with the SLR," he said. The soldier was making downward motions with his hands, "which I understood was to tell him to stop shooting".
Mr Derrik Tucker said he was aged 12 on the day and was watching from the window of his family's second-floor flat. He saw a soldier get out of a Saracen armoured personnel carrier and go to the door of the stairwell of Block 1 of the flats, into which people had fled moments before. This soldier fired a shot into the stairwell.