7/7 inquest: line manager thought bomb was a train coming off rails

A London Underground worker today described the moment that the whole of Edgware station shook as Mohammed Sidique Khan detonated a bomb that killed six people during the 7 July terrorist attacks. Brian Corbin, a line standard manager at Edgware Road, initially thought that a train had derailed at 8.49am. "It was quite a substantial thud, enough to shake the building," he said. Corbin turned to fellow workers saying: "Go and see who had one off the road [a reference to a train derailing]." But it soon became apparent that the situation was much more serious, and as one of the men returned, he said, simply: "Something's happened". The men descended towards the bombed train in the entrance to the tunnel. "There was a female body to the left of the train. That person looked to be dead," he said. He added that the only way she could have got there was if she had been blown out of the train. "She had no shoes on," he said. Corbin left the station in order to call for help, but had no success. "The phone didn't work. I didn't get a signal for many hours after." Asked why he didn't go back to his office, he said: "I could hear sirens, I knew there was activity outside the station and I needed to tell somebody what had gone on." Asked if he had not paused to consider whether he should relay what he knew, because others might not be as well informed, he said: "As far as I was aware, my need was to get someone from outside in because there was other people doing other things around me." Corbin managed to flag down an ambulance on its way to a different emergency near to the station and persuaded one of the paramedics to come with him. At the station he was approached by another woman who said she was a doctor and offered to help. He took both down to the bombed carriage, but told the inquest into the deaths of the 52 people who died in the four terrorist attacks that day that he has since blanked out what he saw. "I don't recollect what I saw because I was just traumatised or scared," he said. He left the carriage to help other uninjured people vacate the two trains in the tunnel. "I went back with the detrainment of the other train. I wasn't ready for that," he said. But when told by a police officer that he should leave the tunnel, as there could be a second bomb, Corbin refused. "I said to him as long as my staff are down here, I will stay down here and if he wanted to leave that was no problem," he said, confirming that he was the last person to leave. The inquest also heard from Daniel Belsten, who described how he was left trapped underneath a set of Tube train doors blown off by the force of one of the blasts. "I just felt a whack to the side of my head. I saw a white flash. Everything was in slow motion. I felt like I was falling through the floor of the carriage," he said. "I could feel hot metal burning, I felt like I was being electrocuted." He added: "I felt like my legs were on the track and they were going down the track and my legs were being sliced off. I just remember the doors being on top of me. I was trapped down on the floor then looked up." He described seeing a man he had seen earlier dressed in a suit and tie. "Next time I looked, his pants had been blown off him. He was just sat there in his underpants. I just looked at him," he said. An academic told the inquest that his legs had likely been saved by his suitcase which was positioned in front of him. "I had my three bags because I wanted to be out the door first, said Professor John Tulloch. "Almost instantly, something quite severe happened. I had no recollection, I didn't ... hear anything, but there was a strong yellow to deep orange colour – the whole carriage was this colour. I briefly saw the carriage and the best way to describe it was, it seemed it was being stretched and pulled. I don't recall seeing anything flying about." Tulloch, who said he had previously experienced an IRA bombing, could see silhouettes of people in another carriage scrabbling at the windows. He described how he had become obsessed with finding his laptop bag, as it contained work for one of his Phd students, but another passenger started talking to him and "dragged me back into the real world". "I remember he talked to me about what his daughter was doing in her A-levels and the universities she was thinking of applying to. This was so deeply embedded and grabbed me so strongly I can almost reel off to this day what four universities those were," he said. Tulloch said he still had shrapnel lodged in his skull, had damaged both eardrums and still suffered symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Andrew Ferguson, who had been due at a meeting in Reading on the day of the attack, but had to go into London first to collect the power supply for his laptop, told the inquest he had climbed into the bombed carriage to reach injured people in need of help. He said: "I don't remember any bang, more of a thud, and as was observed earlier, a jolt. It felt like we had derailed and there was the sound metal on metal. The feeling of being pushed forward." He managed to break the window of his carriage, allowing access to the driver's cabin, form where he proceeded into the bombed carriage. Once there, he spent time helping two American women, identified as Kathleen and Emily Benton. "It sounds strange now, but all I talked about was anything that came into my head. Unfortunately for the girls perhaps, that comprised of where they'd been, music likes, dislikes and probably some inappropriate jokes to try to maintain a level of discussion and keep Emily talking and awake." He said the sisters were taken to hospital and he had sent them flowers. In written statements read out at the inquest, both women thanked Ferguson for his help.