The bullet had torn through the flesh of her leg and shattered the thigh bone.
There was blood, of course, but what I remember most vividly was the dazed shock in her eyes and the way her leg looked like something you might see on a butcher’s block, the gash wetly raw, the bone splintered.
She died, one of 36 unarmed civilian refugees killed by Iraqi soldiers at Camp Ashraf on 8 April of this year.
I wasn’t at the camp, but I have seen film footage of the attack – and it’s not for the faint-hearted.
It shows Iraqi armoured vehicles running over fleeing civilians.
One man, I remember, was trapped under the chassis of an armoured vehicle as it backed up and ran forward, backed up and ran forward.
There were uniformed Iraqi soldiers kneeling as they took careful aim.
I saw another woman fall as she was hit.
A young man risked his own life to help, but she was dead when he got to her.
It was then he recognised the woman: his sister.
I could carry on emoting about the horrors of that film footage: the dust stirred up by the vehicles, the constant crack and whoomp of gunfire, the man hit in the back who slumped tiredly to the ground, the shouting and screaming, the chaos.
And the soldiers – somebody’s sons, husbands, lovers, brothers - calmly taking aim at unarmed men, women and children.
How do they live with it afterwards?
But I’ll stop emoting and attempt some objectivity about a gross abuse of human rights – and our seeming impotence to do anything to stop it.
Camp Ashraf is in Iraq and is home to 3,400 Iranian refugees, all members of the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran – the PMOI.
The PMOI is implacably opposed to the current regime in Iran and is the biggest of the surviving resistance groups.
In fact, it is so opposed to the clerics’ regime in Iran that it fought on the side of Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
That didn’t endear it to the Iranian people.
It also detonated bombs in Iranian cities, killing civilians as well as servants of the state, and as recently as 1999 assassinated an Iranian brigadier-general.
All good reasons why, outside the PMOI itself, the organisation has few friends among the Iranian population.
And also why the Iraqi authorities still regularly accuse the PMOI of being behind plots to re-instate an infidel government in the god-fearing Islamic Republic of Iran.
And also why the Iranian authorities are reputed to have executed up to 120,000 PMOI supporters since coming to power.
The PMOI vehemently denies that it is still a militant organisation, protesting that they are now on the side of the good guys.
They say they have surrendered all their weapons, a fact that has been confirmed both by independent inspectors and by the Iraqi authorities.
They say they are now a peaceable organisation campaigning in a peaceable way to see a democratic Iran.
The world, Iran excepted, seems to agree that the leopard has changed its spots. In 2004, the US gave the refugees ‘protected persons’ status under the Fourth Geneva Convention and, in 2009, the European Union removed the PMOI from its list of terrorist organisations.
However, the Iranian government is not about to forgive and forget.
It wants the inhabitants of Camp Ashraf returned to Iran, where they are likely to face either execution or lengthy prison sentences.
Iraq is lending a hand by making life untenable in the camp.
Meanwhile the EU and others are demanding that the refugees’ human rights and their rights under the Geneva Convention are respected.
They want the refugees recognised by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and allowed voluntarily to re-settle in Europe, the US or Canada.
The Spanish government has become involved, announcing that it intends to investigate and potentially prosecute the Iraqi government for alleged complicity in the April massacre at Camp Ashraf.
In June 2011, some 100,000 Iranians from all over the world rallied in Paris in support of the residents of Camp Ashraf.
It was announced at the rally that 4,000 MPs from 40 countries had signed a declaration of support.
The Law Society Council has also passed a resolution condemning the attacks and individual solicitors, including Council member Malcolm Fowler, have become campaigners for the PMOI and the residents of Camp Ashraf.
But Iraqi armed forces still surround the camp, and there is every expectation that, with no outside intervention from the UK or other democracies, they will go on the rampage again, killing more unarmed civilians.
Like a third woman I saw shot, mouth hanging loosely open, blood the colour of cherry juice, her eyes staring.
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