The civilian gunman seen by Father Edward Daly and others in the car-park of Rossville Flats on Bloody Sunday has since admitted firing a pistol in anger after the paratroopers started shooting, the inquiry heard.
Mr Eamonn McCann said he had interviewed the man subsequent to Bloody Sunday and had quoted him in a newspaper article.
The man's explanation was that he had taken the gun on the march for his personal protection, but he had lost his temper when the paratroopers started shooting and had taken out his gun in anger and fired it.
Mr Christopher Clarke QC, for the tribunal, read out Mr McCann's news report of 1991, in which the man said he fired two or three shots towards soldiers, but did not hit anybody. "I genuinely do not believe I affected the way things turned out. The only person killed in the courtyard was already dying when I opened up." Mr McCann said as far as he was aware there were only two gunmen in the area of the main shootings, around Rossville Flats/William Street. He understood that six shots in all were fired by the Official IRA, but that none of them was fired before the paratrooopers opened fire. He believed there had been no shots fired by the Provisional IRA.
He had spoken to the second gunman also, and this man's account was that he fired one shot from a rifle in the Columcille Court area at British soldiers on the roof of a building, in the immediate aftermath of the army shots that wounded Damien Donaghy and John Johnston.
Mr Edwin Glasgow QC, for a number of soldiers, asked the witness if he could explain why there were not scores of people able to give evidence to the inquiry about the gunman who fired in the car-park.
Mr McCann said he had been struck by the fact that among those who did not notice this gunman were the soldiers at whom he was firing. In the tumult and panic at that time, he did not regard it as strange that people watching the dramatic events in the car-park, where Jackie Duddy lay dead and Mickey Bridge was shot and wounded, would have missed the gunman with the pistol against a gable wall.
Earlier, the witness was questioned further about material in his book, War and an Irish Town, including a statement that Labour Party members in Derry had been given arms-training by a republican training officer who came up from Cork in the autumn of 1969.
He agreed that he knew the identity of this training officer, and of those, including himself, who went into the Donegal hills for "practice shootouts".
The witness was asked about quotations in the book from a man said to have presided over the "trial" of Ranger William Best, a 19-year-old British serviceman from Derry who was murdered by the Official IRA while home on leave in May 1972. Mr McCann told counsel he did not know who had shot Ranger Best.