A former local Civil Rights leader described how a British army officer began slow hand-clapping when he appealed to him to get an ambulance for a mortally wounded youth.
On the 100th day of oral hearings yesterday, Mr Hugh McMonagle, who was vice-chairman of the Shantallow branch of the Civil Rights Association in Derry, said in testimony: "I can still hear the thud of him clapping at a 16year-old shot dead."
Mr McMonagle had earlier agreed to tell the tribunal privately the name of a Provisional IRA member who had given him an assurance that the organisation would stay away from the march on Bloody Sunday.
He wrote the name on a piece of paper and handed it in. Two previous witnesses have adopted the same procedure when agreeing to name people they understood to have been members of the Official IRA at the time.
The chairman, Lord Saville, said it would be open to the individual concerned to make an application for anonymity.
Mr McMonagle told how he left the cover of a low wall to join Father Edward Daly and several others around the body of the youth, Jackie Duddy, who was the first person shot by soldiers in the car park of Rossville Flats on January 30th, 1972. He said: "I thought that, if I was going to be shot, it would be better if I was shot next to a priest so that he could give me the last rites." He then saw another youth, Mickey Bridge, approach a Saracen armoured personnel carrier shouting words like: "You murdering bastards, you shot the young lad. Come on, come on, shoot me." Another Saracen entered the area, Mr McMonagle said, and a soldier got out and raised his rifle. He heard a shot and Mickey Bridge yelled out: "The bastards have shot me in the leg."
The witness described how he helped Father Daly's group carry the body of Jackie Duddy up Chamberlain Street, away from the car park. As they did so, shots were being fired down the street over their heads.
They laid Jackie Duddy down and Mr McMonagle went off to find an ambulance. He approached an army barrier at Castle Gate, beyond which he could see an ambulance further up the hill. A policeman, an army officer and four soldiers were on the wall to the side of Castle Gate.
"I was shouting to them, `Get a f. . .ing ambulance, a wee boy has been shot'. As I shouted at them the officer, who was wearing kid gloves, started a slow hand-clap. I went ballistic." He made his way to another barrier, at Waterloo Street, and shouted at soldiers there to get an ambulance. "A soldier there spoke into his radio in a very pompous English voice and said something like `Bravo, Foxtrot, do you know anything about any shooting?', making out that he knew nothing about what had happened," the witness said.
"I just went for him. I leaned over . . . the barbed wire between us and dragged him towards me. I told him I would `tear his f. . .ing head off'. The other soldiers started hitting me with the muzzles of their rifles, trying to make me let go of the officer. . . I turned around and everyone behind me, including Duddy's body, had disappeared and I was on my own."
Mr Edwin Glasgow QC, for a number of soldiers, put it to the witness that the officer who had been at Castle Gate, a 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Greenjackets, would say "specifically that he never wore leather gloves and (that) he and his fellow officers in that Regiment always wore woollen gloves".
Mr McMonagle said he could still see and hear the officer clapping. "That will never leave me. He can say whatever he likes, whether he wore woollen gloves, kid gloves, that is not the point. He clapped at somebody being shot dead. How can he live with himself?"