BLOODY SUNDAY INQUIRY: British soldiers picked up bodies outside the Rossville Flats and "dumped" them into an army Saracen, despite pleas from bystanders on Bloody Sunday, the Saville inquiry was told yesterday before adjourning for over a week.
Giving her evidence, Mrs Kathleen Hutton, who broke down as she recalled the events of Bloody Sunday, said she saw three or four soldiers standing around a Saracen as if they were guarding it outside the Rossville Flats that day.
Two soldiers picked up the bodies, some of which were still moving.
"They dumped them into the Saracen like lumps of meat going to the abattoir," she said in her statement to the inquiry.
She said she screamed from a window in the flats to a priest below to try to get the bodies, that they were in danger of drowning in their own blood.
"Suddenly the soldiers guarding the Saracen turned on us and shot up at the windows and I remember me and whoever I was with in the flat had to duck.
"The shots didn't hit the window and I got the feeling the soldiers were just firing in our direction to shut us up," she said.
Mrs Hutton, aged 17 at the time, went on the march with two friends and recalled seeing Jackie Duddy lying on the ground in the car park outside Rossville Flats and a man who was administering first aid to him dipping a handkerchief in his blood.
Despite this the army continued to fire, she said, as attempts were made to take him away. She did not see where the fire came from.
She broke down as she was questioned about this incident.
After a brief adjournment, she said: "I spent 30 years trying to forget it and it just all came back when you said it."
Mrs Hutton, whose father, civil rights activist Tommy Carlin, was killed by a bomb in 1970, was also asked if she now recalled seeing soldiers fire shots towards the group around Jackie Duddy.
"I blocked the whole thing out about Jackie Duddy's death until I had to remember it," she said.
She also described looking out the front window of the flat and seeing an old man, Mr Alexander Nash, going to assist his injured son on Rossville Street, and being fired on as he did so.
"I just remember seeing the old man going out to help the boy and thinking it would be fine, he was going to help him, he would be OK and looked at what else was going on at the time and I remember hearing the shot and looked back again and realised that he had been shot as well.
"There was so much panic at the time," she said.
She said she was unsure if Mr Nash and his son were among the bodies thrown into the Saracen.
She said on her way home she passed some soldiers in High Street.
"They looked fairly happy and pleased with themselves as if they had done a job well."
Another witness, Mr Mickey McLaughlin, said he recalled the soldiers in high spirits.
They were smiling and full of adrenaline, he said.
Mr Seamus Duffy described seeing three boys who he believed were members of the Official IRA outside the Bogside Inn, one of whom was Ray Tester, and they were being asked in "very strong language" to clear out of the area by a number of people, including MP Ivan Cooper. Two of them were armed. He did not see them shoot.
The chairman, Lord Saville, said the inquiry had been "seriously dislocated" as a result of judicial review proceedings in Belfast High Court and it was "with deep regret" that the inquiry's staff were unable to find sufficient witnesses to make it worthwhile to sit again until Monday week.