A man today recounted how it had no longer felt safe to venture outside after witnessing Bloody Sunday 29 years ago.
Mr Alan Harkens told the Saville inquiry he broke down crying on returning home on the day of the army shootings in which 13 people were killed.
He said: "I didn't go to work the next day as I couldn't believe what I had seen on the Sunday."
Mr Harkens also maintained he saw no civilians with weapons at any stage on January 30th, 1972.
Mr Harkens said he did not participate in the civil rights march which took place in the Bogside that day, but left his home in the Bogside to watch events.
He saw the body of Jack Duddy (17) - the first casualty to die - being tended by the then Father Edward Daly but said he was unaware the troops were firing live rounds and assumed the teenager had been hit by a rubber bullet.
Later he said he encountered two bodies at separate locations in a stairwell of the Rossville flats and said after seeing the first: "I first realised that what I had been told by other people, namely that people had been shot, was true."
And when he emerged from the flats he saw the body of Barney McGuigan (42) who had been shot in the head. He described him as "a respectable-looking man wearing a coat, shirt, suit and tie".
Mr Harkens told the hearing that between six months and a year later he met a soldier at a social function who claimed to have been in the city on Bloody Sunday. He had told him bodies of dead IRA men had "obviously" been retrieved from storage that day and called victims of the military operation.
"He said he had been positioned on Butcher Gate and that he and his colleagues had stopped ambulances on Butcher Gate on the way to the hospital."
"He said the bodies in the ambulance were dirty and smelly and it was obvious that they were the bodies of IRA men who had been killed and their bodies hidden down manholes.
"From the way he was talking my impression was that he was referring to men who had been shot before Bloody Sunday and it had now been decided to remove them from the manholes.
"I was not sure from my conversation with the soldier whether he generally thought this to be true or whether it was something that he had been told. After he had said this I did not want to carry on our discussions and the conversation ended there." PA