7/7 victims piled up 'like laundry'

7/7 victims piled up 'like laundry': "

Passengers caught in the Piccadilly Line bombing tell of the moments after the explosion and their struggle to escape

Survivors of the King's Cross tube bomb on 7 July 2005 today described how they had to clamber over passengers piled up 'like laundry' before stumbling along the darkened tube tunnel to the platform at Russell Square.

Half of the people who were killed on 7 July died in the blast, when 19-year-old Germaine Lindsay detonated a bomb on a packed rush-hour train.

Passenger Lilian Ajayi described hearing a 'boom', and when she looked up there were bodies piled up on the floor. 'There was a fire, maybe like an electric fire, and then I got scared and I was shouting, praying, 'I'm not going to die, I'm not going to die.''

She noticed a man, later identified as Christian Small, who had been joking about the lack of space on the tube just before it set off from King's Cross station. 'I saw him on the floor, he held on to my leg and said 'Can you please get me off,'' she said.

The man was lying underneath other seemingly lifeless bodies that she described as like a 'laundry basket that was getting piled up'. He asked her: 'Can you get people off me, I need to get up'. But Ajayi saw that one of his legs had been blown off by the blast. 'I couldn't tell him,' she said. She added later in her evidence: '[I was] trying in my own way to protect him.'

Another woman was shaking uncontrollably, her clothes in rags, Ajayi said.

Olawale Akerele described the seconds after he heard a big bang. 'I was lifted off my seat. It almost felt like I was being drowned because I was breathing in heat or air and the smoke was taking my breath,' he said.

After the initial blast, Akerele heard another train approaching and prepared himself for an impact: 'We heard another train on the line and at that point I just accepted death. I just curled up because we thought the signals wouldn't have gone up in time.'

Both survivors described a driver coming with a torch into the carriage and a voice telling the walking wounded to attempt to leave the carriage via the driver's cabin. 'Everybody started scrabbling through the seats, in a sort of panic,' he said. Akerele himself was trapped underneath a dead woman and could not move, he told the inquest. He was finally helped to the platform by a colleague's son who was on the train, and a firefighter. Passengers were leaving with shock, you know – complete shock,' he said.

TFL signal operator Jude Onyeze, whose surname was Obi at the time, was off duty and in the first carriage where the bomb went off. He described people desperately trying to get off the carriage: 'There was a big pile of people, it wasn't like hard, it was like soft. Later on I thought to myself it must have been people that were on the floor, that I was walking through, walking on top of.'

Onyeze supported a man along the dark tunnel, 681 metres to the Russell Square platform, at one point carrying him on his back. He tried to go back into the tunnel to help but was told by London Underground staff that they had to follow instructions to remain on the platform. 'I kept insisting, there was this lady who grabbed my leg and I said I was going to go and bring back help, we need to go back and help,' he said.

The inquest continues.

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