The Sinn Fein chairman, Mr Mitchel McLaughlin, and a French photographer, Mr Gilles Peress, are among several people who describe being shot at, and narrowly missed, by a paratroop officer in the Bogside on Bloody Sunday, the inquiry heard yesterday.
Mr McLaughlin, who was 26 when he took part in the civil rights march on January 30th, 1972, has provided a statement to the tribunal's solicitors on what he saw and experienced that day. His party colleague, Mr Martin McGuinness, is taking legal advice and has yet to decide whether to offer similar co-operation to the inquiry.
In his statement, part of which was read out yesterday by Mr Christopher Clarke QC, counsel to the tribunal, Mr McLaughlin describes running with others away from the army barrier in William Street.
"As I was running south down Chamberlain Street, I heard my first live shot of the day. It was unmistakably a high-velocity rifle shot, but I did not see who fired it or in what direction," he states.
He ran past the opening of Eden Place and took cover behind a house - "I turned round at this point to see who had fired the shot, and I saw a photographer standing about 10 feet from me . . . This photographer was frozen to the spot and seemed unable to move. He looked foreign to me. He was tall, thin and dark, and had a number of cameras hung around his neck.
". . . He had his hands high above his head in the air and was looking to the west through the opening at Eden Place . . . I stepped out from behind the building where I was taking shelter to see what he was looking at.
"I saw a soldier there . . . lifted his rifle up to his shoulder and it seemed to me that he was aiming at the photographer. I shouted at the photographer to run towards me and just at that moment a shot rang out.
"I immediately thought had shot the photographer as he could hardly miss from that range. However, I was not actually looking at the soldier when the shot was fired but it seemed to me that it must have been him who fired the shot. No warning was shouted by the soldier. Nor were any civilians attacking soldiers in this area.
"I saw a puff of dust and a lump of brickwork fly out of the wall of the house immediately behind me. Half a brick came out of the wall where the bullet struck it . . . I was really panicking at this point and started running again south . . ."
Mr McLaughlin describes how he revisited the spot a few days later with journalists from the Sunday Times who interviewed him, "and we worked out that actually the soldier must have been firing at me. He could only have missed me by a matter of inches.
"With hindsight, the first shot that the soldier fired may have been a warning shot. However, I believe that the second shot was a serious effort at blowing my head off."
Mr Clarke said this evidence corroborated to some extent the account given to the Widgery inquiry by Mr Peress, who had said that when he went down Chamberlain Street to the corner of Eden Place he saw a soldier coming from the other direction.
He said to the soldier "Press" and showed him the three cameras he was wearing, and then walked slowly across Eden Place. "Then I heard a shot. He was kneeling with the gun at the hip. I heard a shot and saw a bullet going in the upper part of the window of this house."
Asked at Widgery how he could justify saying the soldier shot at him, he replied: "Because I was the only one, and where I was, and where he was, and where the bullet is. I see no other target. I do not say he shot to kill me, but he took a very fair chance to frighten me."
Mr Peress, in his statement to the present tribunal, expands on the incident - "The soldier made eye contact with me. I stepped out from the cover of the corner and held my cameras up above my head and shouted `Press'. He then fired a shot at me."
This incident is linked to an account given by Lieut `N', commander of the Mortar Platoon of Support Company of 1 Para, who described at Widgery how he was faced by "a menacing crowd" in Chamberlain Street and fired two shots and then a third to disperse them.
Mr Clarke said: "It may be that the shots fired by Lieut `N' were the first shots fired that afternoon after Support Company had gone through Barrier 12. Lieut `N'. . . was in the first Pig [armoured car] and his evidence to Lord Widgery was that no other firing had registered with him at the time that he fired.
"If those were the first shots that were fired, the effect may have been to cause other soldiers in the Mortar Platoon or elsewhere to believe that the army was being fired on . . . Conversely, the shots may have suggested to civilians that the army was firing at civilians."
This latter theory, counsel said, was expounded in Channel 4's documentary, Secret History of Bloody Sunday. This theory was that the reverberations of Lieut `N's initial shots, coupled with the sight of armoured personnel carriers coming down Rossville Street, caused renegade IRA men from the Bogside to fire because they believed the Bogside was under attack.
Counsel added that this was the theory challenged by Martin McGuinness in an article published after that programme.
Mr Clarke commented that Lieut `N's firing above the heads of the crowd was not justified in terms of the yellow card which deals with firing at individuals and tells soldiers to fire only aimed shots.
He added that Lieut `N', however, was "not the only candidate for the firer of the first live shot". The evidence of another witness, Mr Charles Morrison, a NICRA committee member, was that the first Pig to enter Rossville Street drew up level with him and he saw several soldiers jump out. "I saw the first soldier take up [a] firing position [and] I heard the first live shot of the day".