A man who was shot and wounded on Bloody Sunday, then arrested and batoned by paratroopers, was told by counsel for soldiers yesterday there is now no suggestion he had done anything to deserve that treatment.
Mr Patrick O'Donnell, who was then aged 41 and a father of six children, described how he huddled for shelter in a corner in Glenfada Park, with a woman and another man, when soldiers opened fire in the confined space.
He heard a loud crack and felt a burning feeling in his right shoulder. "I was wearing a heavy overcoat and I thought that my coat was on fire ... some smoke came from my shoulder," he said.
He put his hand up to his shoulder and there was blood on it. "I realised that I had been shot," he said. Shortly afterwards soldiers confronted him and other civilians in the area and ordered them at gunpoint to march away. "I was trying to hold [a] hanky to my shoulder and [they] were shouting abuse at me and poking me in the back, telling me to 'get my f...ing hands up' and calling me a 'Fenian bastard'." Mr O'Donnell said he had great difficulty getting his right hand above shoulder level, but eventually managed to put both hands on his head, although this was painful and very difficult.
When the group who had been 'arrested' were told to stand against a wall near a taxi office, a taxi-driver, who seemed to know that he had been hurt, told Mr O'Donnell to go into the office and sit down.
But soldiers burst in, ordered him to get out, and as he went out the door he was hit very hard on the head, receiving a wound that later required eight stitches. When a priest intervened, however, he was released.
Mr O'Donnell said in his statement he still felt bitter about what happened to him and about the fact that he was "probably classed by some people as a gunman and [was] under suspicion for doing something wrong". Mr Edwin Glasgow QC, for a number of soldiers, said there would be no suggestion from his side that the witness had done anything that deserved his being shot, or that he was guilty of any offence.
Counsel said that he should not have been hit with a baton, but added that a soldier has made a statement indicating it might have appeared to them that the witness had left "the area of arrest" and had gone into the taxi-office.
Another witness, Mr Noel McCartney, who was a junior reporter on the local paper, the Derry Journal, on January 30th, 1972, described seeing a wound open in the stomach of a young man fleeing over the rubble barricade in Rossville Street.
Mr McCartney said that, as he ran from the area to find medical assistance, he saw a civilian wearing a three-quarter-length coat and holding a rifle in an upright position.
It was pointed out to the witness he had specified different locations for this sighting, in a statement he supplied to the Widgery Tribunal in 1972 and in the statement to the present inquiry. He said his memory now was of seeing the gunman between Glenfada Park and Abbey Park, in the Bogside.
Questioned by Mr Gerard Elias QC, the witness confirmed that no report about the civilian with the rifle had appeared in the Derry Journal. He had no idea why that was so. The inquiry continues.