Original subtitles

I wanna talk to you in a language that you understand.

I, and thousands like me, we are at war.

You will be our targets.

We will fight.

With our blood.

At 26 years old, you almost think you're indestructible.

You do stupid things. You think you're untouchable.

That day, I'm running late.

I'm starting to get a bit wound up,

and a bit narked at just how shit my morning's going.

I'm standing on a train.

Crammed in like sardines. It's incredibly hot.

Trying to punch a text message into my phone.

Back then, mobile phones aren't what they are today.

If I wanted the letter C, I had to push number two three times.

Big man, big hands, small phone, complete carnage.

I looked up. I was like, "Oh shit. I've now missed my stop."

Can this day get any worse?

Just as we entered the darkness of the tunnel,

I could feel somebody staring at me.

It was just this really unnerving feeling.

It was one of those stares where he didn't blink.

He was totally fixated on what was in front of him.

Almost like he was staring through me. It was that intense.

Um, then I was just about to go, like, "Is there a problem, mate?"

"What you looking at?"

I just went to open my mouth to say it, and I just see his hand go, and then...

Explosions across all of central London.

The worst terrorist attack the capital has ever seen.

Need ambulances in King's Cross.

Fifty-two people are now known to have been killed.

Someone somewhere knows who planted the bombs.

What we now had was a manhunt.

The greatest operational challenge

ever faced by the Metropolitan Police service.

Our anxiety was there would be other attacks.

London is attacked once again.

Terrorists want fear and division.

This was a major intelligence failure.

How you looked identified how you were treated.

An innocent man might've been shot dead by the police.

I've never spoken about this publicly.

This will be the only time I'll talk about it.

I can't explain the feeling.

The world is falling apart.

Suicide bombers. We'd never experienced anything like that.

Hidden in plain sight, and we didn't see it.

These guys that I knew,

never did I have in my mind

that they'd bring war to the streets of London.

Going to work. Get on the Circle line.

Headphones in. Zone out as you do on the London Underground.

Typical young person.

And then suddenly, bang. The train lifts off the track.

Everything just went to black. Then you start hearing the screams.

This is King's Cross St. Pancras.

The next station is Russell Square.

Breaking news, reports of an explosion.

Could've been power-related, is some speculation we're hearing.

There are trains stuck in tunnels.

I heard reports of events on the Underground network.

British Transport Police is quoted as saying

that it's difficult to know exactly what's going on...

Multiple incidents across three different stations within two minutes.

I was able to monitor police transmissions live.

I decided to get a sense of what was going on.

Do a detour.

Go back that way now.

This was more than power outages.

Everybody, stop walking up here, please. Stay there.

A growing suspicion that London was under attack.

It's not safe for you to stand here...

A sense of foreboding.

All units, stand by. Stand by.

The tunnel was completely silent.

One minute, I was stood on the train, the next minute I'm on the tracks.

I was like, "What the fuck am I doing out here?"

Very thick, heavy, like, dust and dirt was in the air,

hitting your teeth and hitting your tongue.

And then you'd hear

one voice, and then another, and then another.

I'd never heard screams like this.

I tried to sit up, and I couldn't.

I could see something sticking up from, kind of, right in front of me.

The pole that I'd been leaning against had sheared off and gone through me.

I had something digging in my back.

I managed to grab it and pull it out,

and it was part of someone's lower leg, and their foot,

and it still had the shoe and the sock on it.

So I'm holding this thing, looking at it, thinking,

"Fuck. This is-- I'm in a bad situation."

There was the body of a young girl behind me.

There was a body of a young man close to where I was.

I could see the carnage around me.

It was like opening the gates of hell.

And I just thought to myself, "I'm fucked."

"I'm gonna die."

Reporter is in the SkyCopter for us this morning,

and look at those pictures, Sarah.

Clearly, this causing absolute chaos in central London.

Roads around the City of London are completely closed off.

Fire engines, ambulances, police cars, absolute chaos.

Move away from the area. Move away from the area, please.

Morning, Steve. What did you see?

Well, I was on the platform at Edgware Road

and then felt this massive thud.

Got evacuated from Edgware Road.

Text my boyfriend and said, "I think a bomb just went off on my tube."

This area needs to be used for paramedics and police attention.

Tube stations are being shut down,

people coming out of the stations...

Total shock.

Move away from this road!

It was disorienting.

Everybody was kind of like, "We don't know what's going on."

What happened?

Uh, yeah, there's people screaming and wailing.

"People are dying in here. Help us."

I couldn't see anything. It was just horrible.

I just wanna get home.

I remember just looking around for bus numbers.

I felt completely lost.

I had no idea where I was.

I didn't realize that day my world would be turned upside down.

Everyone back that way, please!

We were dealing with a series of crises on the tube,

in three different places.

I was trying to make sense and understand what had happened.

MI5 is asking its sources if they know any information about this.

They're reviewing its coverage.

It soon became clear

it appeared to be a pretty serious crime.

We had no intelligence it was going to happen.

We got numerous casualties, and in desperate need of ambulances.

The Prime Minister was at Gleneagles.

The G8 summit in Scotland.

Leaders came together.

I was having a bilateral meeting with the President of China,

and someone passed me a note

um, saying there'd been a serious incident on the London Underground.

Multiple casualties.

It was not clear exactly what had happened,

but you develop an instinct over time, and I...

I thought, "I'm sure this is going to be a terrorist attack."

I'm not frightened of death.

Dying alone terrified me.

People talk about your life flashing before your eyes.

You become fixated on the things that you'll never do.

That I'd never finish my degree. Never get married.

Never have kids. I was gonna be robbed of that.

I started to scream for help.

I've never screamed like that in my life.

And there's 100-plus on the train still.

After the blast, I remember being thrown around,

hitting my head against the glass panel,

the panel breaking.

You could hear people crying, screaming in pain.

I was an ex-military medic.

I was able to help people.

You're walking towards these people that were on the railway line.

They weren't moving.

A lot of them had been burnt beyond recognition.

I just remember this big, dark shadow just appearing in front of me.

Deep, booming South African accent.

He said, "What's your name?" And I shouted back, "It's Dan."

Dan was breathing. He was talking to me.

He had a chance. I was gonna give him the best chance that I possibly could.

My left leg had been blown off, kind of near the knee.

I'd severed the femoral artery, and the blood was pumping out of me.

I took my belt off, and I used that as a tourniquet.

He said, "I'm not gonna lie. This is gonna fucking hurt."

And one thing Adrian isn't is a liar.

He pushed his hand into what was left of my left leg,

found the artery, and pinched it shut.

I kept saying to Adrian, "You've got to remember my name's Danny Biddle."

"I'm 26 years old."

I kept reiterating it to him, and he went, "You're not going anywhere."

I didn't believe that.

I thought that at any minute, that was it, I would go.

I didn't know when it'd be,

but I was sure I wasn't getting out of that tunnel alive.

Please, remain calm. As soon as we're ready, we'll get everybody off.

We were stuck on the train, about 45 minutes.

Through windows, you see people on the track,

just regular people in suits and whatnot.

Every now and again, you'd see someone really badly injured

with their face covered in blood. You think, "My God, what's happened?"

There's no way of opening the doors.

The only way out is through the front of the train

or the back of the train.

There was a horrible burning smell. I just wanna get out of this tunnel.

It was kind of this weird, somber, zombie-esque walk.

That's when I took out my phone and started taking pictures.

When we get to the main ticket area of the station,

it's, like, just complete chaos.

Sheer horror.

- Views of the people commuting... - Sarah, I'm gonna interrupt you.

People are streaming out of Aldgate tube station covered in blood.

Excuse me. What happened?

It was just this almighty bang.

I just thought, well, I thought I was dead.

At least 150 are known to be seriously injured.

It's not known how many people have died.

The fire services and the ambulance crews are now in a desperate race against time.

The police quite panicky.

Can we press back, please...

They asked for our names.

And then it's like, "Mustafa. Oh, really?"

And they ask if they can search my bag.

When they see the name Mustafa, or Mohammed, or Ahmed, or whatever,

it's like, "Okay, he's one of them."

I don't remember them searching anyone else,

but after 9/11, for them, it was like a red flag

when they see the name Mustafa.

When I arrived, it was all hands to the pump.

Radio networks were absolutely clogged with traffic.

It became difficult to communicate with colleagues.

But understanding precisely what we were dealing with was imperative.

What we had feared for so long was actually happening.

Multiple scenes, no warnings, mass casualties.

The hallmarks of extremist, directed terrorism.

More than likely with al-Qaeda having its fingerprints all over it.

9/11, thousands of people killed.

We had to fear

al-Qaeda were looking to mount a terrorist attack in this country.

I was concerned we were going to face other attacks imminently.

It really was a matter of life and death

that we found these people as soon as possible.

I just happened to see the number 30 bus.

I just got straight on it.

Straight for the back row,

just like I did on all the buses I'd got on in school as a kid.

Definitely a sense of relief.

My phone buzzes.

Read the text. It was from my boyfriend at the time, and it said,

"You were right. They were bombs."

"Lucky you weren't involved."

And as soon as I put the phone back in my pocket...

The roof had blown off.

Carnage everywhere.

I was inside the bus.

I could hear people in pain.

It's like a war zone.

I was crawling through bodies, just trying to escape.

I was trying to scream for help.

Screaming, but nothing would come out.

The next thing, this man took my hand, and he helped me.

I just lay down on the ground.

I couldn't actually feel my body.

My neck was broken.

People looked very frightened.

They were looking up at buildings,

afraid that something was going to explode again.

Get off the edge of the road as quickly and as safely as possible!

We did hear another bang just a few moments ago.

We don't know if it was another bomb. This is still an evolving situation.

The scale of the devastation was horrific.

The bomb in the bus cemented in everybody's head

this was a multiple-sited terrorist attack.

I'm just going to make a short statement

to you on the terrible events that have happened in London.

Our thoughts and prayers, of course, are with the victims and their families.

It's important, however, that those engaged in terrorism realize

that our determination to defend our values and our way of life

is greater

than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people

in a desire to impose extremism on the world.

When you're in a position of leadership, you just have to focus on the job in hand

'cause there are decisions all the time that have to be taken.

You have to do that.

I'd have to go back to London and...

take charge of how we handled it.

You know, 9/11 had happened in America, but this was happening here.

Our anxiety was that this was the first,

and there would be other attacks that would come.

Four explosions have rocked central London.

The capital paralyzed, one of the terrorists' intended effects.

Obviously, roads in central London are closed.

Roads headed out of London are completely gridlocked.

Those people trying to flood out

along the hard shoulder,

walking, dragging their suitcases behind them.

Someone somewhere knows who planted the bombs.

Tonight, an unprecedented investigation is underway.

This has been, and still is, a fast-moving investigation.

We didn't know what we were dealing with.

We didn't know whether we had terrorists on the loose.

We had no idea.

But I must emphasize that it is still in its early stages.

This was gonna be the largest criminal investigation in the United Kingdom.

Four very difficult, enormous crime scenes in the heart of the capital.

Thousands of detectives and forensic specialists

joined in the operation.

The tiniest piece of evidence, recovered from the tunnels and the bus,

could be absolutely vital in preventing a further attack.

I wanted on the front line.

I didn't want to be sat back in an office somewhere.

I wanted to catch those who were responsible.

So I asked to be deployed.

I was sent to Russell Square.

You know...

Be careful what you wish for.

You're going to go down to the track where the train is.

There's not anyone else.

All of the injured had been removed from the scene,

so the only people left inside the carriage were the victims.

There was a lot of pressure on finding forensic evidence.

It'd effectively tell us what happened, and who did it.

They said to me, "Look, the bomb scene itself is pretty horrendous."

"You gotta prepare yourself for it."

There was a sense of fear not knowing what we were gonna face.

We walked to the rear of the train.

We entered it from the rear carriages.

There was lots of medical equipment, people had left luggage...

Smoke damage.

And then we walked into

the main carriage itself, and...

you know, nothing could prepare me for what I saw then.

The injuries that victims had suffered...

It was, you know, it was horrendous. Yeah.

I was trying to avert my eyes from the horror.

Moving and dealing with the victims themselves,

that was very difficult.

Holding people and carrying them as if they were sleeping.

You know, I didn't want to knock or jar or do anything.

I thought I was doing an important job to try and catch those responsible.

No one needed to say anything

because we all just got it.

This was now a manhunt.

Police are conducting the biggest ever trawl of CCTV

to try to identify the bombers.

There was a lot of pressure from above.

Everyone was relying on us for information.

Hundreds of hours of footage.

Cameras outside the station.

In the ticket hall, down the escalators, all the different tunnels.

Everyone's carrying something.

Hundreds of people.

Who is getting on and off that tube?

We certainly didn't know who we were looking for.

Whether it be a man or a woman, whether it be from one race or another.

We didn't know if they were on the tube with a device,

whether a device had been planted, and they'd got off and disappeared.

We were viewing people getting on, just going about their ordinary life.

They're getting on, and they have no idea what's about to happen.

It was hard.

They're just innocent people.

We've got to find out who's done this.

We didn't sleep, but we needed to find them

before anything worse happened.

Britain's security services have raised the terrorism threat

to its highest-ever level as the hunt for the bombers continues.

The thing about today's attacks is there was absolutely no warning.

Are you still sticking by the stated idea

that there was absolutely no intelligence and no warning of this attack?

We, um, will rely entirely

on what the security service, uh, can tell us about this.

Everything is being looked at.

There is nothing to suggest intelligence has been missed in any way.

At the time I was sent to report on the 7/7 attacks,

a massive plot had slipped through the net.

Bombers had actually successfully bombed London,

so the intelligence failure was there for all to see.

Absolutely calamitous for MI5 and counter-terrorism police.

We were shocked by the horror and the atrocity of it all,

but it wasn't altogether a surprise.

After 9/11, we had already warned the government

the threat from al-Qaeda was increasing,

and we were not big enough.

We weren't even covering 50% of the problem.

It was a crisis.

Britain was facing a crisis.

So what would've been foremost in people's minds in MI5?

Could there be a follow-up attack?

The reality is there were too many people on our radar

to have them all under surveillance.

At that time,

I was the country's leading expert in improvised explosive devices.

Bomb scenes are total chaos.

This was a big explosion.

A scene from hell, really.

I was joined in the tunnel by Cliff.

The bomb-maker is making a device,

and maybe his fingerprints are on some of the plastic.

Maybe his DNA is on some of the device itself.

The bomb has some clues to who the bombers are.

What kind of device was it?

Was it something like a large pipe bomb?

Was it high explosive?

You go through the rubble, bit by bit, looking for pieces.

Pieces of the explosive device, effectively, sadly, go into victims.

There is a depression

on the ground.

It was packed with human remains.

Looking at where this depression was,

I'm pretty sure that this device has been placed on the ground.

So there's this one body that struck me.

Pretty much all of the ones that I looked at had traumatic amputations

to their lower limbs,

and yet this one had extensive damage to the upper trunk,

and particularly to the face, which pretty much didn't exist.

There wasn't a face.

That, to me, indicates

that quite likely this person has been crouching down

with his face close to the device when it's gone off.

I think it's a suicide bomber.

But am I right?

I'm scared because it can make a big difference

to the line the police investigation will follow.

I'm just crossing fingers and legs and everything else

that I've made the right call here.

Forensics said, "Right, that's the suicide bomber there."

I was like, "Right, okay."

I had to pick up and handle the suicide bomber's lower jaw.

This belonged to the person

who had created all this carnage around me.

It just confirmed every fear that I had.

They were here, in amongst us. They were capable.

You know, we felt like we were at war.

It was the first time that we'd experienced

suicide attacks in Britain.

The new level of lethality, it was the worst-possible scenario.

Suicide bombing was a new dimension.

It'll be the first time we've seen a suicide bomber

here in Europe,

and a significant shift in the war on terror.

We were really concerned about this type of terrorism.

People who do it are prepared to die in the course of doing it.

The consequences are profound.

We were stepping up security measures,

giving the police additional powers to deal with this situation.

But you're never going to have 100% protection against this.

The worst terrorist attack the capital has ever seen.

There are scores of patients still in hospital tonight.

Some have had limbs amputated. Others have multiple fractures.

Many are critically ill in intensive care.

I got home in the early hours.

Of course, one of the things you think about is

did we miss something that could've prevented this?

It's easy with the benefit of hindsight to say,

"We should have spotted these people."

But the biggest concern, straight afterwards,

is not to go back and ask, "Why didn't you spot those people?"

The biggest concern is what happens next.

I am a soldier.

Our words are dead.

Until we give them life with our blood.

We will not stop this fight.

Friday morning, this is 5 Live Breakfast.

Papers report 52 people killed after yesterday's attacks.

The Metropolitan Police at this point have only confirmed 37,

and 700 injured.

London's commuters back to work this morning

in a world which for many, will never be the same.

Terrifying. I'll never get on the tube again. I'll never do it.

Terrorists linked to al-Qaeda are thought to be behind the explosions,

although there's been no clear statement from any group yet.

Hello, good to see you this morning.

Now, the reality of those devastating attacks

are of course the personal stories

of what so many people went through yesterday.

Mustafa, a passenger on the train between Liverpool Street and Aldgate...

The morning show contacted me, "Would you like to be interviewed?"

I'm a bit confused still, like, very dazed.

Mustafa, you feel like you had a very near miss, don't you?

What happened? What did you experience?

I was about a carriage or two away from the actual blast, I mean...

We were on there, a normal day, and then, suddenly, a flash of light.

Terrifying. Mustafa, what do you feel about this?

- Mind if I ask you if you are a Muslim? - Yes, I'm a practicing Muslim.

Kate Garraway goes, "Okay, so, Mustafa, are you a Muslim?"

I was like, "Yes, I am a Muslim."

She says, "How does it feel to be a Muslim?"

How do you feel about terrorists who claim they do--

we don't know the proof of who's behind yet--

Who claim they do carry out attacks in the name of Islam,

that they're putting your religion to such atrocities?

Do we know they're Muslims? Do we know...

I mean, a state of paranoia, like, takes hold of you.

- We don't know anything. - Not necessarily this attack. Generally.

I was 24 years old, I'd just seen people die in front of me,

I was in shell shock,

and you're asking me to explain that I'm not one of the bad guys.

You know...

I mean, my biggest fear now is not what will the terrorists do to me,

but when people see me coming out of the mosque,

what will happen to me as a result?

Will people blame me? I was on the train myself.

Am I gonna be persecuted on both sides of the coin?

Where do I sit in this?

I think it's about time we actually kicked back at these people,

sorted them out properly.

Fears of a backlash were heightened

when a local mosque was attacked.

Islamic Human Rights Commission are advising Muslims

not to travel or go out unless absolutely necessary.

It was an attack designed to sow division.

That's what they wanted.

Mind the gap.

I was one of the very few Muslim-background journalists

working for the BBC, trying to understand British Muslim communities.

When 7/7 happened, I remember being in East London Mosque

speaking to people there, going up to Oldham, to Bradford...

They were echoing the exact same feeling that I had.

There was a fury and a sadness.

So many lives were lost.

This was done in the name of a religion that I was brought up in,

that for me was a colorful, happy, peaceful religion,

that was much more about prayer than it was fighting.

So there was this real anger.

How dare they?

How dare they do this to us?

The backlash that was going to come,

the backlash that was gonna be felt by all of us British Muslims.

And so for me, it was the fear of what was going to come next.

I'm looking for my friend.

She's been missing since, um, yesterday.

We can't find him anywhere. We tried every single hospital...

We don't know any more information about him,

and it wouldn't be like him not to get in contact.

And a tie, and he was wearing glasses.

He's about 5'11", white, fairly pale skin,

with freckles on his arms, uh, and hazel-colored eyes.

Why can't they say, "Look, we're sorry,

but there are people in the train. We're still waiting for bodies."

"If they're not on the list, they're dead."

What about us?

When such a catastrophic event has taken place,

the identification of the dead is not straightforward.

It was pretty horrific.

Sifting through what was left at the scenes,

across four separate explosion sites.

There were thousands of body parts.

You owe it to the dead,

you owe it to the bereaved, and you owe it to the injured

to put your personal feelings to one side and get on with your job.

I don't even know how many days we'd been there.

You're not sleeping, you're eating crap.

Our sergeant was saying, "Go and get a break."

"No, I'm all right. I'm on this."

We just didn't wanna give up.

The direction of the investigation obviously changed.

There were four suicide bombers.

I thought, "Have I missed something?"

"Did I take my eye off the ball?" Second-guessing yourself.

And then rewinding.

And double-checking.

Oh my God, look.

Four guys.

Massive rucksacks on their backs.

There's four guys. There's four bomb sites.

I think this might be them.

It was a massive breakthrough.

We've just found something that could change the whole investigation,

and we have got to identify who it is.

Where did they come from?

We started going back, trawling back.

How did they get to King's Cross?

We were able to piece together that journey.

They got on the train that came from Luton.

It was very soon that we identified the vehicle that they came in on,

which was still parked at Luton.

We had to find out what was in that car.