A woman told the Bloody Sunday Inquiry today she saw a "civilian" gunman open fire that day and later spotted rifles inside a car - but both episodes were deliberately left out of an account recorded for the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA).
Mrs Teresa Bradley was the first person to recount from the witness box what may have been IRA activity in Derry on January 30, 1972, the day 13 Catholics were shot dead during a British military operation in the city.
But she told the hearing the incidents were not included in a statement taken for NICRA five days' later because "my impression was that they just took the statement that they wanted and not all of it that I told them".
She admitted being unhappy about the details being ignored and asked why she thought they were, she said: "At the time were was a lot of emotion. I can't explain why someone else did that."
Then aged 26, Mrs Bradley claimed a lone gunman opened up from a handgun some time after the first civilians were wounded by army gunfire on the fringe of the Bogside district as a civil rights parade was taking place.
He was admonished by others in the crowd and told to stop, she told Day 64 of the Inquiry's public hearings in the Guildhall, Derry.
She said he was on the first floor at the back of maisonettes on Kells Walk "completely alone and pointing a handgun straight in front of him with arm outstretched and firing it in the direction he was facing, the north" - the direction of soldiers posted just beyond the Bogside.
Her statement said: "He was quite close to me. It was not a heavy gun and the firing sounded like pops. I heard him shoot several times. His arm and the gun were moving up and down as he fired.
PA