A former British army soldier, who claims to have shot dead a civilian gunman in the Bogside area of Derry on Bloody Sunday, said yesterday he was "not interested" in the identity of his victim.
Soldier U, who was a private in the Parachute Regiment's mortar platoon on the day of the January 30th, 1972 killings of 13 unarmed civilians by paratroopers during a civil rights march, also told the inquiry into Bloody Sunday that he still had "a horrible mental picture of him falling".
The witness told the inquiry's three judges that the gunman he fired at had fired two shots from a pistol from behind a rubble barricade in the Bogside's Rossville Street.
"I aimed at the centre of his body and I hit him centrally somewhere. He went down immediately," he told the inquiry.
"He was not thrown backwards. It was as if his legs and everything gave way and he just dropped to the floor, like a felled ox," Soldier U added.
"I am confident that I hit the gunman. I could not have failed to hit him even if the weapon was not zeroed, on account of how close I was, the weapon I had and the size of the target area. It has been put to me that there were people around the man who I could have shot by mistake. The man was a direct target as he squeezed the trigger - I had to make a decision then and there and I did so," he said.
Asked by barrister Arthur Harvey QC, who represents most of the victims' families, if he was prepared to help to establish who his victim was, Soldier U replied "I have to be honest, I am not interested."
The witness also said that he had nightmares about the face of one of the 13 victims, whom he no longer believed to have been a gunman. Soldier U said he saw the dead youth's face as his body was carried away from the rubble barricade by two other soldiers. He told the inquiry's three judges that the youth had a head wound.
Only two of the five victims shot dead in the vicinity of the barricade had head wounds - John Young and Michael McDaid.
"I have a vivid picture which has stuck in my mind ever since I saw one of the bodies. He was a young lad and he had been shot in the head.
"As the soldiers carried him past me, his face was very close to mine and he was looking right at me," he said.
"I could not believe how young he was and how pathetic he looked," Soldier U continued.
"I shot a man that day. I have gone over it in my mind many times over the years. I also have the picture of the boy who had been shot in the head engrained in my mind and I have tried very hard to put it out of my mind. I have seen dead bodies before that one but that one was somehow different, I don't know why. He was so young and it seemed such a waste. In all honesty I don't think now he was a gunman."