Very soon afterwards, woken by one of my compadres who had been watching CNN in the main room of our media apartment, I was walking through the city towards the epicentre of the dreadful event.

As I neared the scene where one woman had been killed and 110 had been injured, I dutifully gathered quotes from people milling on the streets. None had been that close to the explosion. Some had heard the blast, or witnessed the aftermath.

I am looking now at the report that appeared under my name in the following day’s Independent on Sunday.  A very professional job had been done by the news desk on Saturday night and the story is an informative mix, featuring some of my copy, but with far more telling quotes from agency sources.

I think this description was mine.

"As dawn broke over the park, the four-tiered AT&T stand where the explosion had occurred stood like a ravaged wedding cake. Drizzle coated a team of workers from the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau as they began identifying the shrapnel fragments at the site. By 11am, the scarred bank beside the ruined edifice was dotted with dozens of fluttering pink markers."

Elsewhere in the piece I now note a contribution that was not mine - an interview with the sound technician working for the band that was playing at the venue when the bomb went off.

It is preceded by this par: "That there were no more fatalities was thanks to a quick-thinking security guard. Even as the bomb warning was being phoned in to Atlanta police, he had spotted an unattended bag at the base of the lighting and sound tower and thought it was suspicious.”

Mark Smith, the sound technician, is then quoted: "Richard, our security guard, didn’t like the look of it and he immediately informed the police. They immediately started clearing the area."

That security guard was Richard Jewell. Viewed as a hero, initially, for his prompt action, which must have saved many lives.

And three days later - flip - he was a villain.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution paper ran a story saying that he was a focus for the FBI, which was treating him as a possible suspect.

Exactly how or why this line of enquiry was pursued - and leaked - is something that has never been unambiguously established. 

The idea appeared to have been based on a "lone bomber" criminal profile. The thinking behind this was that Jewell, who had been a police officer before becoming a security guard, had planted the bomb himself in order to be able to act as a hero.

During the closing days of the Games, the images we saw in our TV room were of Jewell’s house, around which much of the world’s media appeared to have encamped. He was described as being "a person of interest" to the FBI, which kept him under 24-hour surveillance and twice, very publicly, searched his home.

The climate of opinion began to ease only after Jewell's attorneys hired an ex-FBI agent to administer a polygraph test, which Jewell passed.

Jewell remained top of the FBI’s list of suspects for 88 days.

On October 26, 1996, the investigating US Attorney, Kent Alexander, in what was considered an unusual act, sent Jewell a letter formally clearing him, stating "based on the evidence developed to date...Richard Jewell is not considered a target of the federal criminal investigation into the bombing on July 27, 1996, at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta."

In 2005, Eric Rudolph pleaded guilty to the Olympic Park bombing as well as bomb attacks on two abortion clinics and a lesbian bar and was sentenced to life in prison.

This perplexing and disturbing history is the subject of a film released in the United States this week, entitled simply "Richard Jewell" and directed by Hollywood’s Clint Eastwood.

One part of what has generally been a well-reviewed film has raised ire - the plot element that has Kathy Scruggs, the reporter who broke the story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Jewell was a suspect, sleeping with the lead FBI agent in the case.

Scruggs died in 2001, aged 43, and Agent Donald Johnson died in 2003. There is no evidence that they had a sexual relationship.

The cast features Paul Walter Hauser - who has previously appeared in "I, Tonya" and "BlacKkKlansman" - as Jewell, whose life was marred and marked by his brutal and extended "trial by media".

The trailer shows Jewell sitting across from FBI agents - played by Jon Hamm and Ian Gomez - as they coach the security guard into repeating the bomber’s telephoned threat.

"There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes," Jewell repeats several times at the requests of the interviewing FBI agents, who claim the repetition is "to clear your name."

Jewell, who was never charged, filed libel lawsuits against several media outlets, including NBC, CNN, the New York Post and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He died in 2007, aged 44, from a diabetes-related heart attack.

All the media outlets settled with Jewell except for the Journal-Constitution. In 2011, the Georgia Court of Appeals dismissed the claims against the paper by Jewell's estate, ruling that the Journal-Constitution had accurately reported on investigators' suspicions at the time and that "even though the investigators' suspicions were ultimately deemed unfounded - they [the articles] cannot form the basis of a defamation action."

During Jewell's funeral service in Meriwether County, Georgia, his former attorney, Lin Wood, revealed that on each anniversary of the 1996 Olympic bombing he would slip away, often at night, to place a rose and a card where spectator Alice Hawthorne was killed.

He reported that Jewell wished he could have helped the person he couldn't get to in time.

"Richard rarely told people about what he did that night," Wood told about 300 people gathered at Brookhaven Baptist Church.

"Richard thought it was all in a day's work."