The sister of a Bloody Sunday victim, Hugh Gilmour, was one of two female witnesses who described yesterday how they watched from their homes in the Rossville flats as soldiers continued shooting in the car-park below.
Mrs Mary Bonner recalled that the last time she saw her youngest brother, Hugh, aged 17, alive was when he left their mother's flat to join the civil rights march on the afternoon of January 30th, 1972.
She was on the walkway outside her second-floor flat some time later when she saw a crowd of screaming people running towards the car-park. Two Saracen armoured cars arrived at speed, two soldiers jumped out of the first one and one of the soldiers seemed to begin shooting immediately, firing his rifle from waist height.
She saw the young man, Jackie Duddy, running across the car-park, and she saw Father (now Bishop) Daly run past him. There was a bang, and Jackie Duddy fell down face first. "I could not tell where the shot that hit [him] came from, but I connected it in my mind with the soldier that I saw shoot his gun when he got out of the back of the Saracen. The two events were simultaneous."
Almost immediately afterwards she saw another man walking out with his hands up and he appeared to get shot in the leg. Looking from her bedroom window on the other side of the flats shortly afterwards, she saw another of the fatal victims, Paddy Doherty, slump to the ground.
Mrs Bonner said the family heard early on that Hugh had been shot, but did not know whether he was dead. She and her sister went that night to Altnagelvin Hospital, where "there seemed to be hundreds of people . . . Everyone was looking for someone".
She said: "We checked with the nurses and doctors but Hugh's name was not on the clipboard. They checked in the wards but he was not there. They suggested we check in the morgue.
"At the morgue there were bodies on trolleys, and we went right around them. Hugh was right in the corner, farthest away. We went home to tell my mother."
She said that when she gave evidence at the Widgery inquiry in 1972 she was questioned about Hugh, and she thought it extremely unfair that a suggestion was made that he was charged with rioting in October 1970.
He worked at the time with the Northern Ireland Tyre Service and was detained one day as he walked home from work with his hands dirty from oil and tyres. When the police checked with his employers he was immediately released, and was never charged.
Mrs Cathleen O'Donnell was a teenager at the time and lived on the top floor of the Rossville flats with her family. She told the inquiry that her father was an Englishman who had been in the [British] navy and he did not want her to go on the march, "so he and my mother hid my shoes on the Sunday so that I couldn't leave the flat".
However, she found some red wooden Scholls and slipped out of the flat. As she walked towards William Street, crowds began to run back screaming towards her and she could hear shooting.
She also ran, stumbling over the rubble barricade towards Block 1 of the flats, and she lost her shoes. She climbed the stairs and crawled along the top balcony towards her home. As she did so she saw a black soldier and a white soldier in the car-park below firing their rifles all around.
She noticed a young boy run across the car-park. "He looked happy . . . I do not think he saw the soldiers. People were shouting at him to lie down. I was shouting at him too, `Jesus, lie down'. Suddenly I saw his arms go up in a V shape and he fell flat to the ground . . . I saw blood running out from underneath him."
At this stage she was close to the door of her flat, and she remembered there were some girls from Belfast there "grabbing the railings and screeching and squealing . . .
"I was panicking and shouting: `He's shot, Daddy, he's shot!'. My daddy grabbed hold of me and prised the other girls' fingers off the railings and threw us all into the flat," she said.
Another witness, Mr Noel Doherty, described seeing Jackie Duddy fall in the car-park, and going out to help him with his hands in the air. While kneeling beside the youth, he saw a soldier at the corner of the flats open fire.
The inquiry continues today.