A witness whose face was lacerated by a gas canister on Bloody Sunday described how he was smuggled across the Border for treated in hospital at Letterkenny.
Mr Hugh Heggarty, who received injuries when the canister was shot into his face as he stood watching rioting in William Street, said he feared arrest if he sought treatment at Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry.
"My face was such a mess that if any soldiers had seen me it would be obvious that I had been somewhere near the rioting," he said. "At that time, if you were arrested for rioting you almost automatically got a six-month prison sentence . . . There was no way I was going to Altnagelvin Hospital because I would have been put away, no questions asked."
Mr Heggarty had been a guest at the wedding of John Nash, whose brother, William (19), was one of the 13 people shot dead by soldiers the next day.
"There was a whole gang of us at the wedding who decided to go on the [civil rights] march," he said. "We were a group of friends." He told Mr Michael Mansfield QC, for the Nash family, he believed that most of the group, including Willie Nash, were still wearing their wedding clothes when they joined the march.
The witness said he had been helping stewards try to turn back youths who were causing trouble at an army barrier in William Street when he noticed up to 10 soldiers on the roof of the GPO sorting office. Some youths were throwing stones up towards them.
Suddenly, as he looked away, he was hit in the face by a gas canister and lost consciousness. Mr Heggarty said he woke up to find himself on a sofa in a flat in the Rossville Flats complex, "with a priest standing over me giving me the last rites".
The next day he was treated and kept overnight for observation in Letterkenny Hospital.
Mr Heggarty declined to name those who had helped him get to Letterkenny, as they had asked him at the time not to involve them. He agreed, however, that the tribunal could access any records of his treatment at the time which might be kept by his doctor or at Letterkenny Hospital.
A former Derry bar-owner claimed that, some time before the paratroopers entered the Bogside, he spoke to a senior army officer and asked him to hold off taking any action against rioting youths. The officer replied: "No, we are going in."
He said that when he spoke to the officer at the junction of William Street and Waterloo Street, he formed the impression that "whatever happened, the army was determined to go into the Bogside and, I believe, to start shooting in order to draw the IRA out".