Dan Biddle was standing close to Mohammad Sidique Khan when he exploded a bomb on the London Underground in the 7/7 attacks – he has told of the mental trauma as well as physical injuries he suffered
It’s nearly 20 years since Dan Biddle was carried, bloodied and burnt, out of London’s Edgware Road Tube Station – his eye and both legs lost and his mind forever scarred.
He had a 2% chance of recovery yet Dan would fight on to become a symbol of defiance – as 7/7’s most-injured survivor. Nearly two decades on from the terrorist suicide bombings of July 7, 2005, he’s still fighting. He has daily battles with Complex PTSD, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety and survivor’s guilt, and is haunted by hallucinations of the bomber’s face. And Dan is fighting for the government to finally do right by the victims ahead of next month’s 20th anniversary – by launching a full public inquiry.
“Some 52 people lost their lives, why doesn’t that warrant one?” he asked. “I knew that getting blown up, life was going to be tough but I didn’t think it would be unjust.”
More than 770 were injured when four jihadists blew up three tube trains and a bus. Dan is back there every night, 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.”
Dan was 26 and 6ft 4in when his old life ended on his way to work at a construction site. He was standing close to bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan who was sat with a rucksack on his lap.
“I was about six inches from touching him,” recalls Dan. “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.”
Dan hit the tunnel wall and landed in the space between the tunnel wall and the tracks. “Both my arms and hands were on fire, 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, catastrophic injuries.
“And then wherever I looked after that, the next one I saw was 10 times worse. There was no escape from 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.” Dan was found by an ex-Army medic who risked his life to crawl across the tracks to help.
He pinched Dan’s femoral artery shut, just a minute before he would have bled out. His heart stopped 5hree times in hospital. The last time, the surgeon took nearly 15 minutes to get it going again by hand. He 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 start. A noise, smell or word will leave him transported right back to the tunnel – 10, 15 times a day. OCD means he drives 100 miles home to check he’s locked the door.
And he hounded by survivor’s guilt and night terrors. “I see Khan 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.”
There’s no cure for Complex PTSD but Dan, who now lives with his wife Gem in Abergavenny, Wales, is hoping Keir Starmer will finally realise what an inquiry could mean to him and others.
In 2011 a judge ruled at the 7/7 inquest that MI5 was not to blame despite monitoring Khan and another bomber four times before the attacks. Dan says: “A public inquiry won’t give me my legs back. It won’t give me my eye back.
“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.” Dan, who is in the four-part Netflix series Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 bombers from July 1, says. “It’s time for answers.”
