Saville Inquiry: Army bullet ‘wounded onlooker at window’

A 40-year-old man was shot by a soldier in the living room of a flat on Bloody Sunday as he watched events with his wife, the Saville Inquiry heard today.

Celine Brolly told the hearing in the Guildhall, Londonderry, that her husband Patrick suffered a wound to his head and was knocked unconscious in the episode.

Mr Brolly was never placed on the official list of casualties of January 30 1972 - 13 dead on the day and 13 wounded.

Mrs Brolly, who was 35, said she was with her husband in a second-floor dwelling in the Rossville Flats and was watching the then Fr Edward Daly - later to become Bishop of Derry - move towards the fatally injured Jack Duddy in the car park below them.

She recounted shouting to one of the soldiers across the car park that someone had been hurt and ‘‘the next moment Patsy told me the soldier was pointing his gun at us and threw me down onto the floor’’.

‘‘A bullet smashed a hole in the sitting room window and Patsy was wounded on top of his head,’’ she added.

A friend said a prayer of contrition into her husband’s ear as he lay unconscious, his head bleeding heavily, according to Mrs Brolly.

‘‘We were all crying,’’ she said.

‘‘For a long time afterwards I thought that a rubber bullet had been fired at the window and that Patsy had been wounded by splinters of glass.

‘‘However, the hole that the bullet made in the window was only a small one and I was later told it was a lead bullet.’’

Mr Brolly was taken by a local priest to Altnagelvin Hospital in the city for treatment and the injured man’s wife recalled: ‘‘Patsy did not stay long in Altnagelvin.

‘‘He said he saw some horrible things there and in the ambulance too. He said that at the hospital doctors and nurses were all crying and it was just ‘blood, blood, blood’.’’