A witness told counsel for British soldiers yesterday that a lawyer during the Widgery tribunal in 1972 had been "playing games with words" and had elicited a possibly misleading statement from him.
Mr Francis Dunne, a former school principal, was being cross-examined by Mr Edmund Lawson QC on his evidence to the inquiry when he took issue with the nature of questions concerning his replies at the Widgery hearing.
Mr Lawson put to the witness several times that he had admitted in those replies that nail bombs were sometimes used in riots and that he would have expected "a couple of nail bombs at least" to be used if the army tried to stop the major Civil Rights march on Bloody Sunday.
Mr Dunne said he had agreed that nail bombs were used occasionally, but he had heard no nail bombs that day. He said counsel at Widgery had been trying to establish "almost like a law of geometry" that there would be two nail bombs used every week or whatever.
Mr Dunne said he certainly had not intended to give that impression. He said replies he had given during his evidence at the Widgery tribunal, and impressions that had been created, had been due to the "leading" questioning of "one of yourselves, the legal profession".
"The impression that is created is created by the questioner, because they control the agenda when they ask the question," said the witness. He told Mr Lawson he had answered questions honestly, "but I think you can draw too much from what is there, and I think you are".
Another witness, Mr Charles McLaughlin, told of witnessing from Rossville Flats the shooting dead of his work-mate, Patrick Doherty. Through an open window of his flat, he had seen a man pulling himself along on his stomach.
"This man was out on his own in the open and I thought that if he kept going he would be done for . . . I shouted to him something like: `Stay where you are or they'll shoot you.'
". . . I saw a lead bullet strike and bounce off the pavement [near] the crawling man . . . Then he clasped his hand up to his right side and said: `I'm shot again.' "
The witness said that later, as a group of people carried the body away, they passed below his window, and "I saw the dead man's face and recognised him as Patrick Doherty, a work-mate of mine at Du Pont."
He added: "The way he was killed hit me very hard and broke my heart."
Mr McLaughlin also described seeing the civilian gunman known as "Father Daly's gunman" in the Rossville Flats car-park. This man, holding a pistol, put his hand around the corner of a wall and "fired several blind shots north towards the waste ground without looking".
Another man then seemed to appear from nowhere. "He took the gunman by the lapels and banged him backwards against the gable wall." The witness said he thought this man was telling the gunman in no uncertain terms that he would draw fire from the army and put nearby civilians at risk.
The inquiry continues today.