London under attack

July 7, 2005

Like millions of people, I remember my Tube journey 20 years ago today. I remember the front cover of the Metro with the joyous news that London had been awarded the 2012 Olympics ahead of Paris, Jacques Chirac’s Gallic sneering about food having lost it for Paris; I remember how those jubilant images of Kelly Holmes in Trafalgar Square graced the front cover of the morning free paper. The capital was in a happy mood, even if many Londoners were cynical about whether we could pull it off.

I was on an eastbound Piccadilly Line train from Hammersmith to Green Park, where I’d catch the Jubilee to my work at Waterloo or Southwark; which of the stations I’d choose was totally arbitrary, and sometimes I’d take the District to Blackfriars instead - but commuters often take these decisions at the last moment.

The District Line was always slow but it was direct, and less busy, and I didn’t especially like being in crowded, confined spaces underground. The Piccadilly, in contrast, is one of London’s deep level underground lines, with narrow tunnels and an intensely claustrophobic feel in rush hour. Serving Heathrow, it is often made worse by the presence of tourists straight off the plane carrying rucksacks and heavy luggage.

I remember that on the morning of July 7, 2005, a group of young American women in our carriage had been unfortunate to have arrived on the network just in time for rush hour with a ludicrous number of large bags. The carriage was unbearably crowded and uncomfortable and in my memory I gave up my seat for one of them (this may be false, but I like to think it was the kind of thing I’d do). The poor tourists were in virtual stress positions, entangled with other passengers and embarrassed about their clobber. It was armpit to face stuff, all of us in that strange kind of enforced commuter intimacy, as close to strangers as anyone ever gets.

Shortly before 9am the train paused at Hyde Park Corner, and we waited. The delay continued, eventually lasting for minutes, frustration building. Then came an announcement that the train would stop there, and we were to make our own way to another station (again, this might be faulty memory – maybe they told us to leave the Tube altogether).

We made our way to the exits, and I remember thinking that London would struggle to run the Olympics if it couldn’t get a rail system to work; I imagine that many Londoners felt the same way. I headed towards Green Park, but no one was being allowed in, so I decided to walk the rest of the way, frustrated that I’d be late. When I called my boss to tell him, he was understanding and said there were problems across the Tube with an electrical fault.

Six stops to the east, heading in the opposite direction, a train had pulled out of King’s Cross St Pancras Underground station heading towards Russell Square. It was described as being at ‘crush capacity’.

Travelling in the first carriage, passenger Lilian Ajayi had boarded at Finsbury Park, where the Piccadilly Line was experiencing delays. Many commuters had crossed over to the adjacent Victoria Line, which travels to many of the same stops, but she stayed. In her later testimony, Ajayi recalled that she sat down on what was later identified as Seat 77:

‘I was about to sit there, but I could see a lady, there was a lady beside me that I could see in her face an urgency to sit down, so I just let her, I just said to her “You are free to use that one”. Immediately afterwards, someone else got up, I think they left the Tube,’ and so she sat opposite the woman.

At King’s Cross the train filled up. She described how a tall black man in a blue shirt had entered the doors ‘and this gentleman… He walked in, he was more nearer to my side, and everyone kept on pushing, I was sitting with my book, and I think some people wanted to come in as well, and when they said, “Can you please move in?”… he joked and said, “Where do you want us to go? On the roof?”’ She recalled that ‘everyone laughed’.

Ajayi went back to her book, at which point she described a ‘boom’. It was 8.49am.

The woman in Seat 77 was killed. So, too, was the man in the blue shirt, Christian Small, on his way to his job in advertising in Holborn, a loving son and brother, described as ‘respectful, diplomatic and caring’. He was just 27.

Ajayi remembered seeing the injured piled up around her ‘like a laundry basket’, and in the immediate aftermath tried to help a man whose leg injuries were too serious to save. She didn’t want to tell him the full extent of his injuries, because he was dying.

Within almost touching distance of Ajayi, Paul Mitchell felt what he later described as ‘an extremely loud pop and a very bright yellow light’. He was thrown to the ground and recalls ‘complete and utter pandemonium’. He soon realised that his leg was bleeding badly.

Nearby was twenty-two-year-old hairdresser Philip Beer, who had been on his way to work at a salon in Knightsbridge. He had travelled with his friend Patrick Barnes from Borehamwood each morning, the two men getting a lift that day from Beer’s 24-year-old sister Stacy. The commuter train service was slow that morning, and they reached the Piccadilly Line 15 minutes later than usual.

The two men had been ‘standing face to face, holding on to a bar, when Barnes felt as if he had been hit on the head with a brick,’ according to later Guardian report. A moment or two later he heard the screams. He couldn’t see his friend for the smoke, and shouted ‘Are we going to die?’

‘No, everything's going to be fine’, Beer said, but both his legs had been severed.

When paramedics arrived in the carriage, they recalled the sound of mobile phones buzzing away in unison as loved ones desperately called the dead. Among them was Beer’s sister, who was one of millions to hear the news coming in of something dreadful happening on the Underground. Her brother, tragically, was among the 52 innocent people who lost their lives in four bombs aimed at London’s transport network on July 7.

In times of tragedy, people reach for cliches, because they are true, and in his 20^th anniversary speech commemorating the event, the King recalled how the bombings showed ‘the very best of humanity in the face of the very worst’ - and those are not empty words.

In the same carriage, 22-year-old Julie Imrie from Huddersfield remembered being ‘blasted backwards’ and thinking: ‘I am having a nightmare, this is not real… I turned to my right to look at where this sound had come from and I saw this huge fireball coming towards me and I remember looking at it and then turning away. I remember thinking I am going to die, I'm going to be with my grandma and grandad, and that was the last thought that I had.’

The carriage was ‘plunged into darkness’ and ‘the moans and really quiet noises started at first and then grew louder’, as the injured and dying called out for help.

She realised that her legs were entwined with those of Mitchell, who had been standing nearby when the bomb exploded. One of Mitchell’s leg was badly hit, and he was losing a lot of blood; he would have died had the quick-thinking 22-year-old not helped him tie a tourniquet around his leg, using her coat and a sanitary towel, with the help of other passengers.

The four bombers had taken a Thameslink train from Luton at 7.24am, scheduled to arrive at 7.59 at King’s Cross Station, and from there to fan out in four different directions, two taking the Circle Line, one on the Piccadilly and the fourth boarding the Northern Line. Their commuter train had been delayed, and it was not until 8.23am that they arrived in the Tube network, where further delays would prove fateful.

The Northern Line, to those of us who have to endure it, has long been notorious for breakdowns, and that day was no different, with its Charing Cross branch experiencing severe delays.

Australian Gill Hicks was supposed to take that branch from Tufnell Park to Leicester Square, but switched to the Piccadilly at King’s Cross St Pancras, where passengers coming from the Northern Line Bank branch stream onto the platform at its western end. As a result, she entered the first carriage by the second double-doors –where 19-year-old Germaine Lindsay was holding a bag packed with 5 kilograms of explosives.

Hicks later described panicked screams, believing that she had had a heart attack before realising the true horror of the scene. In one of the most extraordinary tales of survival, the Australian tied her scarf and jacket around the stumps of her legs, putting her hand into her thigh to make the tourniquet. The judge at the inquest later remarked on her ‘indomitable spirit’ and described with awe how with ‘determination to live, willpower and quick thinking, you saved your own life’.

Hicks would be the last living victim to make it out of the tunnels, taken to St Thomas’ Hospital where she was identified as ‘One Unknown’; she lost three-quarters of her blood and went into cardiac arrest several times.

During these moments, Hicks was aware of a woman called Alison talking to her, trying to keep her conscious while assisting another passenger: Alison McCarthy had joined the train at Finsbury Park, passed out when the bomb exploded, and despite injuries to her feet, remained on board to help passengers.

Doctor Susan Harrison, finding herself on top of 28-year-old Shelley Mather, held hands with the dying woman until ambulances arrived. Mather, having suffered a collapsed lung, died on the stretcher.

Simultaneously, two bombs had erupted on the Circle Line at Edgware Road and Aldgate, an older, shallower line which is less confined, and less crowded, hence the lower death tolls.

At Aldgate, Philip Duckworth had been standing right next to the bomber, Shehzad Tanweer. Duckworth was almost left for dead, and heard one rescue worker say: ‘This one’s gone’, but he staggered to his feet and onto the platform. Remarkably he survived, with a small piece of Tanweer’s shin lodged in his eye.

On the same carriage, airport worker Andrew Brown blacked out for 15 minutes, initially thinking he had been electrocuted. He lost a leg, but would have died had it not been for off-duty police officer Elizabeth Kenworthy, who climbed into the carriage and tied tourniquets. Kenworthy also saved the life of Martine Wright, spending an hour with both of the severely injured, and won an MBE for her bravery. Wright had suffered 80 per cent blood loss and spent days in a coma, among three unidentified survivors whom 23 families hoped to claim as their own; she lost both her legs, and would go on to represent Britain at the 2012 Paralympics games.

On the other side of town, at Edgware Road, Daniel Biddle, a 26-year-old project manager from Romford, had been suffering a ‘nightmare morning’ delayed by a migraine and a broken ticket machine. He was late for work, and stressed.

In the Netflix series Attack on London, Biddle described how he missed his stop, too busy trying to punch in a text message to work on a Nokia phone; in those days typing out a text message using just nine buttons was laborious.

Biddle had been conscious of the man sitting opposite him on the carriage, that he was acting in an odd manner. He ‘was staring through me’, he recalls, and the Essex man was so uncomfortable that he was about to ask ‘is there a problem mate?’ At that point, he recalled, ‘I just see his hand go…’

Biddle watched as Mohammad Sidique Khan detonated his bomb right in front of him. He later told the inquest: ‘He didn't say anything, he didn’t shout anything that I can remember hearing. He just looked down the carriage [and] made his arm movement.’

There followed a ‘big white flash’ and ‘the kind of noise you get when you turn a radio on, that white noise. It felt like the carriage I was in expanded at a fast rate and then contracted quickly.’

Biddle was propelled against the tunnel wall, and had large metal debris over his legs. ‘As I was trying to move myself around I had something digging into my back. I repositioned my shoulders, reached behind me and pulled out that much of a leg and foot.’

There were several dead bodies around him, one only 2 feet away, and his own condition was obviously perilous. A pole had gone through his legs, as well as those of another victim, and he recalled in the documentary that ‘it was like opening the gates of hell and I just thought to myself, I’m fucked. I’m going to die.’

At that moment, ‘I was terrified, seeing what I had seen, and thought I was going to die. So I was screaming just as loud as I could to get help.’

In the smoke-filled carriage, awaiting death, ‘I just remember this big dark shadow appearing in front of me and a deep booming South African accent that said “what’s your name?”’

Standing by him was Adrian Heili, who had served in the Austrian Army and had first aid training. When he heard the explosion in the next carriage, Heili had jumped out of the train onto the adjoining railway line, and with the help of Tube driver Lee Hunt, ignored the risk of electrocution to walk along the tracks where he remembers seeing the victims lying, ‘many… burnt beyond recognition’.

Hearing Biddle’s scream, Heili shouted out to him and made his way to the injured man, climbing under the train to get to him, through a pool of ‘thick liquid, which I later attuned was blood’.

He recalled how he saw Biddle and thought ‘he had a chance. I’m going to give him the best chance I possibly could’.

Biddle was missing a leg, and blood was pouring out of femoral artery, which Heili closed with his thumb and forefinger, using his belt as a tourniquet and ripping off his shirt to tie around Biddle’s other leg.

Biddle tells how Heili said to him as he stemmed the bleeding: ‘I’m not gonna lie to you, this is really going to fucking hurt’, and ‘he pushed his hand into what was left of my left leg.’

Heili told him, ‘Don’t worry, you’re not going, you’re not going anywhere,’ Biddle remembers: ‘I didn’t believe that for a second’.

Paramedics arrived on the scene 25 minutes after the explosion, and Heili helped them insert an IV line into the critically injured man before walking along the tunnel to find a stretcher. Biddle lost both his legs, one eye and his spleen – but he lived.

Heili returned to the carriage, making repeated trips and helping a number of walking wounded from the train, ending up as the last person to leave. He was later awarded a Queen’s commendation for bravery.

Professor John Tulloch had been seated by the double doors on the same carriage, just feet away from the bomber. The people immediately to his right were all killed, but he had recently arrived from Australia and so had three heavy bags with him, one of which, a hard suitcase, was placed by his feet - almost certainly saving his life. Despite this, he had suffered severe head injuries from the blast, and he was starting to fade.

In stepped Group Captain Craig Staniforth, an RAF wing commander, who had been travelling in the next compartment, and who now smashed a window to enter the devastated carriage and swung in. Capt Staniforth stuck with Tulloch, talking to him about his daughter in a desperate attempt to keep him awake; Tulloch survived, still carrying the shrapnel in his head.

Others acted with great heroism and compassion. Suhel Boodi also entered from another carriage and attempted to save 29-year-old Laura Webb; at Aldgate, events organiser Steven Desborough cradled a dying Carrie Taylor, aged just 24 after refusing to be evacuated and instead climbing into the carriage. ‘I don’t know why,’ he late recalled, when asked what made him turn back. On the same train, dancer Bruce Lait was sitting further along the carriage and permanently lost some of his hearing; he held the hand of 29-year-old Fiona Stevenson as she died.

After initial reports of a power surge, at around half-nine television news began showing reports of people streaming out of Aldgate Station, covered in blood. At 9.29, the police declared a major incident. As the Tube network was evacuated, people headed for the buses.

At Tavistock Square, Lisa French, a BT employee from Newcastle, boarded a Number 30 bus, behind a young Asian man carrying a large rucksack; but when he sat down at the back of the top deck, his bag took up so much room that there wouldn’t be enough room for her laptop. She moved a few seats ahead of him instead.

Emma Plunkett had been evacuated from the Tube at Euston where she met her colleague Shahara Islam, a 20-year-old from Plaistow in the East End. The two had been advised to board a bus, and while Plunkett had suggested getting a coffee first to avoid the crush, Islam was worried about being late for work. The two young women got on the top deck, Plunkett by the window and Islam in the aisle seat; beside her was the young man with the rucksack.

The two friends talked about the power surge on the Tube that morning, and Plunkett remembered that ‘We were saying there’s no way London could cope with the Olympic games - that all it takes is a power surge and this happens.’ That was the last thing she remembered.

The fourth bomber, Hasib Hussain, was supposed to have targetted an Underground carriage, but had trouble with his device, and so went to buy a nine-volt battery from WH Smith at King’s Cross. The Tube had now been shut, and CCTV later captured him walking along Euston Road before heading into McDonald’s, and then boarding the Number 30 heading for Old Street.

At 9.47am, the bus in Tavistock Square, Hussain detonated his bomb. Emma Plunkett was hurled out of the upper deck, landing under a taxi, and later recalled ‘I didn't remember anything of the explosion. One minute I was talking to Shaz and the next minute I was lying on the road.’

Shahara Islam was killed. Relatives recalled her as an ‘Eastender, a Londoner and British, but above all a true Muslim and proud to be so’.

Lisa French survived, with cuts and bruises, a perforated eardrum and missing teeth. Many years later, she would meet with the devastated father of the bomber, who could never understand how his son could do such a thing.

Among the dead was mother-of-two Marie Hartley, from Lancashire, who had been on a day trip to the capital; after being evacuated from the Tube, she had sent a text to her family telling them that she was safe.

Victims came from across the country and the world: Atique Sharifi, just 24, had fled the Taliban three years earlier, while Sam Ly’s family had escaped communist Vietnam for a new life. Gladys Wundowa had come from Ghana to work as a maid and cleaner in London, and had recently begun a course on household management. Among those interviewed for the Netflix documentary, her daughter Azuma described the heart-breaking moment she was told, knowing she would never have her mum by her side again, no one to fight her corner: ‘that 16-year-old died when my mum did’.

Daniel Biddle came out of a coma more than a week later and, despite efforts by hospital staff to shield survivors from the news, turned on the BBC news to see the face of the man facing him that day: Mohammad Sidique Khan, in his chilling suicide bomber’s video, issuing his declaration of war against the British people.

‘I punched the telly,’ he recalls in the documentary: ‘I can’t imagine what was going through his head except for vitriolic hate for every single one of us’.

As the details of the four killers became known, so the realisation of that hate had become clear. Suicide bombing had come to western Europe, and it was not to end there.