EXCLUSIVE 'It's as if the bombing happened 30 seconds ago': Heartbreaking words of 7/7 bombings survivor - as he reflects 20 years on from tragedy

Daily Mail​

17 hours ago

'Whenever I do interviews, people go, Oh, I don't want to take you back to that dark place of the day. That's where I live. That's where I am 24-7.
'It's as if the bombing happened 30 seconds ago, not 20 years ago. My brain still can't fully process what happened that day.
'I suffer from night terrors, flashbacks, panic attacks, depression, and it all stems from what happened that day, trying to live with that trauma. At times, it feels like life is worse than death.'
Those are the chilling words of Dan Bridle, the most seriously injured survivor of the 7/7 bombings, as he relives the moment which changed his life forever, when he locked eyes with a suicide bomber who blew himself up in the London underground.
It happened on a busy summer's morning in London, in 2005. Four terrorists, each carrying a rucksack packed with explosives, unleashed hell on the capital, blowing up three Tube trains and a double-decker bus in the deadliest Islamic terror attack in British history, claiming the lives of 56 people and injuring hundreds more.
Dan was carried out, bloodied, burnt, his eye and both his legs blown off, with a two per cent survival chance.
And despite the miracle of still being alive following such a brutal experience, 20 years on, while his physical wounds may have healed, the mental scars run just as deep.
The ghosts of that dark July morning still haunt him, in his sleep, in his thoughts, and in every silent moment.
That Thursday morning started like most days for the then-26-year-old, working on a construction site early in the morning.
He said: 'I woke up at my normal time, about quarter past five in the morning. I had a really bad migraine and didn't feel very well, so I decided that I'd go back to sleep.
'Then, when I woke up later on, I'd ring in sick and let the guys know that I wasn't coming in.
'I woke up about an hour later and felt better, so I decided that I'd get myself up, have a shower, and take myself off to work.'
That day, everything seemed to conspire against Dan Bridle. By the time he left his house in Romford, Essex, he was already running 90 minutes behind. A small delay, which would end up setting the course of events in motion.
A bus was waiting just around the corner, an unexpected bit of luck, or so it seemed. But it only made it a short distance before a burst water main halted everything.
Dan sat there, torn between returning home to fetch his car and waiting it out. He chose to stay.
Finally reaching Romford station, he moved through his usual commute: Romford to Liverpool Street, then on to Baker Street, and from there, the Bakerloo line to Wembley Central and then to the site. A route he'd taken countless times.
But nothing about that morning was routine. As he climbed the stairs to the platform, he realised he'd forgotten his travel card which forced to rely on a ticket machine.
Eventually, he boarded a fast train to Liverpool Street. A silver lining, or so he thought, until a signal failure at Stratford delayed them again.
'Normally I would have bought a cup of coffee, a sandwich, a newspaper, a couple of cans of Red Bull and a couple of Mars bars just to get me through the day. I didn't do any of that. I just ran straight through the concourse, put my ticket into the ticket barrier.
'As I'm coming down the steps onto the Circle Line platform, there was a train already on the platform and it was heaving.
'And I just decided that I'd just wait for the next one. I was late anyway, so a couple of minutes wasn't going to make a difference.'
As he gets into the carriage packed with commuters going about their everyday business, it catches his attention.
'I remember we pulled into King's Cross Station, and I saw a guy get on at the front of the carriage I was in.
'He walked past me, went to the far end of the train, and basically stayed there.
'He had a baseball cap on, a parka-ish looking jacket, blue jeans, and was carrying a rucksack.
'He also had a beard, but it was a tightly shaven beard. It wasn't really long or out of control; it was neatly trimmed.'
The man, who ended up sitting inches from Dan, was bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan.
Dan went on: 'And then I just saw him walk back past me and he sat down next to where I was standing.
'And at the time, I was training up a young site manager on the site I was running. So I had the idea of typing a text message in my phone, getting off at Baker Street, running outside the station, sending a message, coming back in, getting the next train and finishing my journey.'
He looked down to his phone, frantically typing up a message, but misses his stop, but quickly works out quickly he can stop at Paddington and change to the Bakerloo Line.
They're now at Edgware Road station, and the train's doors have just closed and it's about to go into the tunnel.
'The train pulled out of Edgware Road Station, and we travelled a little way into the tunnel when I felt somebody staring at me. I looked around, and the guy sitting next to where I was standing was just staring at me. I thought it was a bit odd, but I went back to what I was doing.
'It was almost like he was looking through me. It was just this intense stare, as if he was looking right through me.
'Then, when I saw him lean forward and look down the carriage, he sat back and started staring at me again. He began to make me feel a little uneasy because he was staring at me so much.
'I was about to turn around and say, "What's your problem, mate? What are you looking at? Then I saw him reach into the bag, and suddenly there was a big white flash, an immense amount of heat, and a huge shockwave hit me.
'It blew me off the train. I hit the tunnel wall and landed in the crawl space between the tunnel wall and the track.'
His first instinct was that there had been an electrical explosion and that Dan was thrown off the train by the shockwave hit the tunnel wall and landed in the space between the tunnel wall and the tracks.
'I realised I had landed in a prime position with my arms above my head. When I brought my arms down, both my arms and hands were on fire. I just lay there looking at them, thinking, "Surely this should hurt more". It stung, but it wasn't excruciating.
'I literally watched the flames go out, then looked around to see what was going on.
'That's when I saw the first dead body behind me, and everywhere I looked after that, the horrors just got worse.'
In the shocking seconds after the blast, Dan says there was a deadly silence, no screams, just stunned confusion.
Survivors lay tangled with the dead, everyone desperate to make sense of the horror unfolding around them.
The terrifying stillness screamed louder than any explosion, as panic and disbelief battled for hold in those heart-stopping moments.
'You could have heard a pin drop in that tunnel,' the 46-year-old said. 'It was like there was the blast and then it was almost like everybody had took an intake of breath and waited for somebody to make a noise.
'And when one person did, it was like opening the gates of hell. The screams, the crying, the fear, it just all kind of hit like a tsunami.'
This was the second blast of three, which were all carried out within 50 seconds of each other, with the first happening on a Circle line train between Liverpool Street and Aldgate and then on a Piccadilly Line service which had just departed King's Cross St Pancras.
Soon after this, it became apparent that Dan had the catastrophic and life-changing injuries he had sustained. His left leg had been completely blown off, whilst the bones on his right leg were shattered from the knee down.
His liver, colon, bowel and kidney had all been lacerated by a pole which went through his body whilst also suffering similar injuries to his head and mouth.
Frankly, it was a miracle he was still alive, and in the middle of all that, he was trapped under debris.
It was during this time that he heard a voice out of the darkness, 'What's your name?' It was Adrian who promised, 'Keep talking to me, I'll find you.' Adrian, severely injured himself - he'd dislocated his shoulder, broken ribs, and had a deep head wound - had crawled under the train to reach Dan.
A former Austrian combat medic with Kosovo experience, the man calmly lifted debris, assessed Dan's injuries.
'He knew exactly what to do. When he found me, he lifted the debris off and assessed my injuries.
'The first thing he said was, "I've been in this situation before and never lost anyone". Then he asked, "Do you have anything I don't want to catch?" I replied, "No, all good".
'He knelt down in front of me and said, "I'm not going to lie to you, this is really going to f***ing hurt".
'With that, he forced his hand into what was left of my left leg, found the femoral artery, pinched it shut, and stopped me from bleeding to death.'
For 40 agonising minutes, Dan and dozens of others lay motionless on the tracks in the pitch-black tunnel with time stretching like minutes, not seconds.
'A minute felt like a week. It was a horrendous wait. I thought I was going to die. The atmosphere down there was fear and panic, and nobody knew what had gone on.
'People just wanted to get out. And it was terrifying. There's no other way to describe it. It was absolutely terrifying.'
As paramedics descended into the tunnel and found him, they quickly rushed to get him out as soon as possible.
They spent a long time pumping fluids and painkillers into him and then secured him onto a scoop stretcher and began the slow process of getting me out of the tunnel.
It was only as he emerged from the station that Dan finally got a sense of the magnitude of what had happened.
He was rushed to St Mary's Hospital, and there began an almost year-long process of recovery for him.
He was sedated, had three cardiac arrests, all three in which he had to be resuscitated and had 87 units of blood; he had his left leg amputated near his hip, while the right leg was amputated through the knee.
He was treated for burns and was in a coma for eight weeks, and during that even contracted a rare infection from bacteria which had been kept in the Victorian tunnels.
He was in intensive care for 12 weeks and in the hospital for 51 weeks, and he was finally discharged on June 30, 2006.
'[The doctors] can't understand how I'm still alive.
'The lead consultant who looked after me at St Mary's was a gentleman called Duncan Black. And Duncan's South African, and he said over the course of his career, he's dealt with landmine injuries, gunshot wounds, and machete attacks, all during apartheid in South Africa.
'And he basically said to my parents that any one of my injuries singly should kill me. How I'm still alive, he had no idea.'
In the years that followed, he struggled with mental health after witnessing the horror of that day, and when he reached out to mental health teams at the time, he was told that it would be 18 months before he could see a clinician.
It was only after seven years and three suicide attempts that he was able to get the support he desperately needed.
But 20 years on, he still finds himself re-living that awful day.
'I've not slept properly for almost 20 years now. I have night terrors constantly. If I sleep for more than four hours a night, I've done well.
'And it's never four hours solid. It's four hours of broken sleep. And I just have nightmares. The 7-7 is like a horror movie on repeat in my head that I can't turn off.'
On the 20th anniversary of the attacks, the now-married 46-year-old, who has published a book called ' Back From The Dead ' on his horrific experience which changed his life forever, is calling for a full inquiry into how the attacks slipped through the net.
Despite calls from survivors, families, no full public inquiry has ever taken place.
Instead, in 2006, the government released a Home Office narrative report, a summary of the attacks and what was known but critics slammed it as a whitewash.
Then came the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) reports in 2006 and 2009, which admitted 'missed opportunities' by MI5, but still no courtroom-style public inquiry.
In 2011, a coroner's inquest into the deaths of the victims finally gave more details and found that the attacks could not have been prevented, but MI5's decisions were open to criticism.
He added: 'I don't have any form of closure. It's still as raw and as painful now as it was when it happened.
'I think closure comes when you get some understanding of how this could happen. And we've never had a public inquiry into 7-7. So you can't get closure until you have some understanding as to how this happens and how these individuals can slip through the net and carry out these atrocities.
'So when we talk about closure, I don't think anybody would ever fully get closure from the day.
'But I certainly think if we knew what had gone wrong, if we knew what the failings were and things like that, you get some understanding of how it happened. But unfortunately, the government have treated most of us who were there on 7-7 with utter contempt, and they won't do a public inquiry, so they're just happy for us to keep suffering.'