I survived 7/7, but still see the suicide bomber everywhere

Twenty years have passed since the 2005 London attacks, but Mohammad Sidique Khan, the face of the chief suicide bomber, never abandoned Dan Biddle’s memory.

It sounds as real as the day they look at each other’s eyes today.

Dan, who has stress disorder after complex trauma, says, “I can be in the kitchen and stopped in the garden.”

“He’s there, dressed in the day, holding his backpack, just on his hand, he’s about to explode again.”

Even if he looks at it, he’s still there when the bombing plane looks back.

“I saw that this man literally dismantled himself in front of me, and now I see him again.”

WARNING: This article contains details that some readers can find sad

On July 7, 2005, Dan was in touch with Khan on the London Underground Flat line train. How he survived is almost beyond the rational explanation.

“As I withdrew from Edgware Road Station, I could feel someone looking at me. I was about to say and I see him put his hand in the bag.

“And then there was a clever white, bright flash – heat as I have never experienced before.”

Khan detonated a homemade bomb made using a chemical recipe defined in the back pit.

The device killed 22 -year -old David Foulkes, 24, 24, Laura Webb, 29, Jonathan Downey, 34, Colin Morley and Michael Brewster.

In total, 52 people were killed that dayWith four bombs detonated by Islamist Foreign Folds. 770 more injured.

Dan was blown from the train, hit the tunnel wall and fell into the scanning area between the tunnel wall and the track.

Their injuries were disaster. His left leg flew up. His right leg broke off the knee. He experienced second and third -degree burns on his arms, hands and face. He lost his left eye – and hearing on that side.

He experienced a great tearing on his forehead. He entered a pole body from the inner fittings of the tube train and endured the kidneys, lungs, columns and intestines and endured tearing. Then he lost his spleen.

Dan was the heaviest wounded victim of attacks to survive. And he was conscious throughout.

Initially, the white flash thought was an electrical explosion.

The debris had fallen to him and his arms and his hands were burning. He could see the flames trembling.

“Immediately after the explosion, you could hear a pin fall. It was as if everyone seemed to have taken a big breath,” he says, “and then it was like opening the doors of hell. He screams like I have never heard before.”

He could see some of the dead. He tried to lift himself out of the wreckage. He noticed how much he was bleeding.

“The first emotion was one of the disbelief. Certainly, God, it’s just a nightmare.”

Dan’s mind immediately turned to his father and how he could not bear to witness it.

“My father can not be the person who enters into a morgue and said, ‘Yes, this is my son’.”

He didn’t believe he would get out of the tunnel. But instinctively, the desire to survive came in and screamed for help.

The first person to respond was Adrian Heili, a passenger who served as a war doctor during the Kosovo War. If he was someone else, he believes he’il die.

“The first thing he told me was, ‘Don’t worry, I was in this situation before and I didn’t lose anyone’.

“And I think, ‘How can you live this before?’

“And then he said to me: ‘I will not lie to you. This will really hurt.’ ‘

Adrian applied a tourniquet and squeezed the arter in Dan’s thigh to kill the bleeding. Dan’s life was in Adrian’s hands until the medical officials reached him about half an hour later.

Adrian helped much more in the following hours – and in 2009 he received the Queen’s praise of courage.

Dan’s trauma was far from ending. He was taken to the nearby St Mary’s hospital, where he entered the heart stop again. At one point, a surgeon had to manually massage his heart to bring him back to life. He was given 87 units of blood.

“I think we all have something – this is the desire to live.

“Very few people are pushed to the degree that this is necessary.

“I survive to Adrian and extraordinary care and only NHS and my wife’s brightness.”

Physical survival. But the transition to Dan’s mental health was something else.

In an induced coma, eight weeks later, Dan began a year -old journey to leave the hospital – and realized that he had to walk around the world in a different way.

It was consumed at night with mental torture.

He had to close his eyes and sleep because he would find himself in the tunnel.

“I wake up and [the bomber] He stands with me, “says Dan.” I will drive – in the back seat of my car. I will look at the store and have a reflection – on the other side of the street. “

These feedback led to what Dan described as Survivor’s crime.

“I repeated that moment millions of times in my head. Is there anything that made him do it? Should I see something about him, then I should try to stop it?”

Until 2013, it reached a dangerous low level. He tried to get his own life three times.

But at the same time, he had now started a relationship with his wife’s jewel – and that was a very important turning point.

Next time he approached suicide, he was the face of the Gem, when he closed his eyes, and he realized that if he ended his own life, he would apply a terrible trauma to him.

Gem convinced Dan to make a mental health assessment – and he started to get the help of his expert.

In 2014 – as part of the therapy and attempts to manage the situation – he agreed to do something he thought he could never do: return to Edgware Road.

When the day arrived, he sat down from the station and heard his 7/7 sounds again: screams, shouting and sirens.

He and Gem put pressure. There was more return when entering the ticket hall.

The station manager and staff were waiting for him and asked if he wanted to go down to the platform. Dan said it was a “very distant bridge”. Gem insisted on going together.

When they reached the platform, a train came in. He started to feel sick. But the train continued quietly without incident – and when a third train came, he had the courage to ride him.

“I really feel sick. I’m sweating. Crying. Tense, I’m waiting for an explosion.

And then the train stopped at the point where the bomb went to the tunnel – an arrangement between the driver and the station manager.

“They had stopped the train exactly where I was lying.

As the train was withdrawn, something in Dan urged him to descend from the next station and move forward with his life.

Im I will leave the station, I will do everything I will do today, and then I will marry this amazing, beautiful woman, or he says. The two tied the knot the next year.

Eleven years later, he tends to do something positive with his life.

Now he manages his own company that helps people with disabilities – a professional journey that he might have never started without a bomb.

He still has returns and bad days, but he finds ways to direct them – and he published a book about what he had experienced.

“I am still very lucky to be alive. I paid an enormous, tremendous price. I will continue to fight every day to make sure that he and his actions have never won.”

A list of organizations in the UK, which offers support and information with some issues in this story, can be accessed from this address. BBC Action line