Twenty years ago, Dan Biddle was carried, bloodied, and burnt, missing an eye and both his legs out of Edgware Road tube station.
Mr Biddle was given a 2% chance of recovery but went on to become a symbol of defiance as 7/7’s most-injured survivor.
Nearly two decades on, he struggles daily with complex PTSD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hallucinations of the bomber’s face, anxiety, and survivor’s guilt.
Mr Biddle is calling for justice for all the victims before next month’s 20th anniversary and urging the government to launch a full public inquiry.
“Some 52 people lost their lives, why doesn’t that warrant one?” he asked in an interview with the Sunday Mirror.
“I knew that getting blown up, life was going to be tough, but I didn’t think it would be unjust.”
The terrorist suicide bombings of July 7, 2005, killed 52 people and injured over 770 others when four jihadists blew up three tube trains and a bus.
Every night, Mr Biddle returns to the scene when he closes his eyes. “I have been exhausted for 20 years because I dread going to sleep,” he says. “The minute I go to sleep, I’m on the floor in the tunnel.”
The day of the attacks, Mr was 26, and on his way to work at a construction site – standing close to bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan who was sat with a rucksack on his lap.
Mr Biddle, who now lives with his wife Gem in Abergavenny, Wales, recalls: “I was about six inches from touching him.
“He was staring at me, and I thought it was a bit odd. I noticed him lean forward and look along the carriage. And then he sat back and was staring at me again.
“I was about to ask him what he was looking at. And then I see him put his hand into the bag. There was a white flash. It was just incredibly, incredibly bright, the feeling of a huge amount of heat. I was blown through the carriage doors.”
Mr Biddle collided with the tunnel wall and landed in the space between the wall and the tracks. “Both my arms and hands were on fire, and then I did the one thing that I wish I hadn’t done: I started to look around.
“That’s when I saw the first dead body. A young lady, with catastrophic injuries.
“And then wherever I looked after that, the next one I saw was 10 times worse. There was no escape from the horror around me. I heard people screaming, and then the screams stopped, and I knew why.
“Those screams don’t ever leave you, and the smells…well, the smells never go away. It’s a mixture of molten plastic, burnt meat, blood.” `
Mr Biddle was found by a former Army medic who risked his life to crawl across the tracks to help him. He pinched Dan’s femoral artery shut, just a minute before he would have bled out. In the hospital, Mr Biddle’s heart stopped three times - the last time, the surgeon took nearly 15 minutes to get it going again by hand. Dan woke up eight weeks later.
“I’ve got an artificial left eye. My left eardrum was completely blown out,” he says. “My right eardrum was perforated, my spleen burst, both my lungs were punctured, my kidney was punctured, my liver was lacerated, and my colon and bowel were ruptured, I had burns, an open forehead, a 20p wedged in my bone, and sepsis.
“If you said to somebody this list of injuries, they go: ‘They’re dead. Yeah, simple as that.”
The physical injuries were just the beginning of Mr Biddle’s battle after 7/7. Complex PTSD means that between 15-10 times a day, a noise word, or smell will transport Dan back to the tunnel. His OCD means he drives 100 miles home to check he’s locked the door, and he is relentlessly chased by survivor’s guilt and night terrors.
“I see Khan [the bomber] a lot, it’s like being haunted by him,” he says.
“I can wake up in the middle of the night, and he’s standing next to the bed, leaning over me. It’s a really strange sensation because I know he’s dead. I’ve watched the guy kill himself.”
At the 7/7 inquest in 2011, a judge ruled that MI5 was not to blame, despite monitoring Khan and another bomber four times before the attacks.
Mr Biddle hopes Keir Starmer will finally launch a full public inquiry for survivors and victims. “A public inquiry won’t give me my legs back. It won’t give me my eye back,” he says. “But I’d have a sense of justice that somebody has been held accountable.
“Khan got what he wanted. I’m living the life sentence he and the others should be serving. It’s time for answers.
