A photojournalist's assistant who taped the sounds of Bloody Sunday shooting claimed the most hardened person would have been touched by the "monstrous scene", the Saville inquiry heard today.
Giving evidence in Derry's Guildhall Ms Susan North said she saw five of the 13 who were killed and four of those injured as she and her colleague Mr Fulvio Grimaldi found themselves in the thick of events in the city on January 30th, 1972.
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Twice that afternoon she believed soldiers shot at Mr Grimaldi, whose photographs include the famous scenes of the now retired Bishop of Derry Dr Edward Daly tending to the dying Jack Duddy and the horrifying picture of Barney McGuigan lying dead on his back in a pool of blood.
She also described how then Father Daly ducked as he ministered to Jack Duddy in the shadow of Derry's Rossville Flats. She claimed in her written statement: "It was my clear impression he was being shot at."
She also maintained she witnessed no sign of IRA gunfire in the car park as paratroopers who opened fire that day insist was the case.
She stated: "I did not have any feeling that I was in the middle of a gun battle.
"The feeling that I had was that the danger was all coming from my right - that is from the direction of the soldiers."
Ms North said she saw the injured Peggy Deery being carried to safety and a defenceless and hysterical Michael Bridge shot and wounded in the car park - both after encountering the scene of Mr Duddy in the car park of the flats.
Mr Grimaldi himself then started shouting and swearing at the troops and was "being fired at by them", she said.
Ms North and Mr Grimaldi subsequently ran beyond the flats complex through a gap between two blocks only to come across the bodies of Patrick Doherty, Mr McGuigan and Hugh Gilmour.
She stated: "Fulvio was busy taking photographs. All I wanted was for the earth to swallow me up. I was deeply ashamed."
She then recalled Mr Alexander Nash - who was shot and injured trying to rescue his fatally wounded son William - telling how his son was dead at a rubble barricade around the corner on Rossville Street but stated: "I was so shocked by the things I had seen I did not want to see any more."
Ms North and Mr Grimaldi then went to a flat to use a telephone and, on the way up, having to climb over the another body - that of Kevin McElhinney - covered by a yellow blanket on the stairwell. Two of the teenage victim's young friends sat beside it.Ms North later returned to the spot where Mr McGuigan lay to borrow a roll of film from another photographer and said people were appearing, "shouting, swearing - grief-stricken".
"Even the most hardened person could not fail to have been touched by the monstrous scene," she stated.
PA