“I looked into the eyes of the man who was immolated in the subway in front of me and now I see it everywhere”: the testimony of a 20 -year survivor of the London attacks that left 52 dead

“I saw this guy literally disassembling in front of me and now I am seeing it again.”

WARNING: This article contains details that some readers can find disturbing.

Biddle was very close to Khan on a train line of the London Metro, during the peak time of July 7, 2005. How he survived is almost inexplicable.

“When I left the Edgware Road station, I felt someone watched me. I was about to turn around and ask: 'What do you look?', And I saw him put his hand in the bag,” he says.

“And then there was a bright white flash, a heat like never experienced before.”

Khan had detonated a homemade bomb, made of a chemical formula devised by Al Qaeda, which he had in his backpack.

The artifact killed David Foulkes, 22, Jennifer Nicholson, 24, Laura Webb, 29, Jonathan Downey, 34, Colin Morley and Michael Brewster, both 52 years old.

In total, 52 people died that day for four bombs detonated by Islamic extremists. Another 770 were injured.

Biddle shot out of the train, hit the tunnel wall and fell into the space between the tunnel wall and the road.

His wounds were catastrophic. The bomb flew his left leg. The right was cut off from the knee. He suffered second and third grade burns in arms, hands and face. He lost his left eye and also the audition on that side.

He suffered a massive laceration on his forehead. A post of the internal connections of the train was stuck in the body and suffered perforations and ruptures in the kidneys, lungs, colon and intestine. Subsequently, he lost his spleen.

Biddle was the most severely injured victim of the attacks he managed to survive. And remained aware at all times.

Initially he thought that the white flash was an electric explosion.

He had fallen debris on top and his arms and hands were on fire. I could see the flames flashing. “Immediately after the explosion, a pin was heard. It was almost as if everyone had breathed deeply,” says Biddle. “And then it was like opening the doors of hell. Screams as I had never heard them before.”

Biddle could see some of the dead. How much he tried to get out of the debris, realized the profuse bleeding.

“The initial feeling was total disbelief. He thought: 'My God, this is just a nightmare!'”

Biddle immediately thought of his father and how unbearable it was for him to witness this.

“My father cannot be one of those who enter a morgue and say: 'Yes, it's my son,'” says Biddle. “I couldn't bear that idea.”

I didn't think I could leave the tunnel. But the will to survive invaded him instinctively and shouted asking for help.

The first person to respond was his travel companion, Adrian Heili, who had served as a combat doctor during the Kosovo War. If any other person had been, Biddle believes he would have died.

“The first thing he told me was: 'Don't worry, I've already been in this situation and I have never lost anyone.” And I thought: 'How is it possible that you have gone through this before?' “

“And then he told me: 'I'm not going to lie to you. This will really hurt.'”

Heili applied a tourniquete and closed the artery of the thigh to Biddle to prevent him from bleaking. Biddle's life was literally in his hands until the paramedics could arrive half an hour later.

Heili helped many more in the following hours and in 2009 he received the decoration of the queen to value.

Biddle's trauma was far from finishing. He was taken to the St Mary's hospital, where he suffered repeated heart strikes. At one point, a surgeon had to manually massage his heart to return his life.

They administered 87 units of blood.

“I think we all carry that fundamental desire to live. Very few people come to be seen in situations where (that desire) is required.”

“My survival is due to Adrian, the phenomenal attention and the brilliance of the NHS and my wife.”

Physical survival was one thing. But the impact on Biddle's mental health was another.

After eight weeks in an induced coma, Biddle undertook a one -year trip to leave the hospital, and realized that he would have to develop in the outside world in another way.

Their nights were consumed in mental torture.

He was terrified to have to close his eyes and fall asleep, because he would find himself again in the tunnel.

“I wake up and (the terrorist) is by my side,” says Biddle. “I was driving, he was in the back seat of my car. I look at the showcase and see his reflection, on the other side of the street.”

These flashbacks have caused what Biddle describes how the survivor's fault.

“I have repeated that moment a million times. Was there anything in me that drove it to do it? Should I have seen something in it and then have tried to stop it?”

In 2013, Biddle had touched background. He tried to commit suicide three times.

But he had also initiated a relationship with his current wife, Gem, and this was a crucial turning point. In the next opportunity he was about to commit suicide, it was Gem's face that saw when he closed his eyes and realized that if he ended his own life, he would cause him terrible trauma.

Gem convinced her husband to make a mental health evaluation and began to receive the expert help she needed.

In 2014, as part of his therapy and attempts to control his condition, he agreed to do something that he thought would never do: return to Edgware Road.

When the day came, Biddle sat outside the station, experiencing memories and listening again the sounds of July 7: shouts, screams and sirens.

He and Gem went ahead. Upon entering the box office, there were more memories.

The station chief and the staff were waiting for him and asked if he wanted to go down to the platform. Biddle said it was too much. Gem insisted that they were all together.

Upon arriving at the platform, a train arrived. Biddle began to feel bad. But the train continued on its road without incident, and when a third train arrived, it armed themselves with value to climb.

“I felt fatal. I sweated. She cried. I was tense, waiting for an explosion. I expected that heat and that pressure to hit me.

And then the train stopped at the point of the tunnel where the bomb had exploded, an agreement between the machinist and the station chief.

“They stopped the train just where I was lying. I remember looking at the ground and it was a very strange feeling: knowing that my life had really ended there.”

While the train started, something inside Biddle drove him to get off at the next station and move on with his life.

“I'm going to leave the station, I'm going to do what I have to do today and then I will marry this incredible and beautiful woman,” he said at that time. They married the following year.

Eleven years later, Dan feels driven to do something positive with his life.

Now he directs his own company, which helps people with disabilities to find work, a professional career that perhaps he would never have undertaken not for the bomb.

He still has bad memories and days, but he finds ways to manage them and published a book about what he has lived, under the title “Back from The Dead: The Untold Story of the 7/7 Bombings” (Back of death: The story not told of the 7/7 attacks.

“I am very lucky to remain alive. I have paid an immense, huge price. I will continue to fight every day to make sure that he and his actions never win.”

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