by Cliff Todd
Well, with almost perfect timing, perhaps a minute later, the phone rang in the wagon, which Robin answered. It was Robin’s boss, an SO15 DI (detective inspector), saying, “Just a heads up, Robin, I’ve sent a DVR superintendent down to see you, while this is all sorted out. Keep him sweet, will you?” At which point I had to leave the wagon, as howling with laughter would have seemed insensitive!
I later learned that this incident was treated by Robin’s boss with a sort of resigned sigh, as Robin was quite well known for this approach, and the DVR guy was just another victim, and no one to lose any sleep over. Apart from which, everyone was naturally very stressed, and had far more important things to worry about just then – probably just as well for Robin, since in a different situation, this probably would have been a big deal.
Eventually the impasse was sorted, with SO15 having primacy, but agreeing to allow the removal of the bodies as a priority, where it would not significantly interfere with essential evidence recovery. As a later learning point, SO15 exhibits officers were all to be trained in DV recovery protocols, so as to be able to incorporate that into their whole scene management approach.
In fact, although frustrating at the time, this delay worked out, because Sharon arrived with Sarah M at about 17.00, and without the delay they would have been too late to go down with Robin and Co., for the first evidence recovery phase.
And so, back down into the tunnel, me, Rob, Sharon, Sarah, Robin and I’m sure one or two others, this time by means of the motorised trolley, which was a much better means of travelling than trying to walk along the tunnel.
As we approached the front of the train and came to a stop, we saw the first hints of the nightmare that awaited, and the nightmare that must have been faced by victims and rescue workers alike – discarded medical wrappers and IV bottles, etc., discarded around the track in front of the train. These would have been from casualties taken out of the carriage and then treated on the track (or maybe the trolley) – but in either case, the horror of the dark and dirt and confusion of trying to do that can only be imagined. The train had just passed through a wider tunnel junction and then entered this narrow tunnel when it came to a stop. Here there is only inches between the train and tunnel walls, but these trains have a door in the front of the driver’s cab, presumably with this in mind, and this is how we now entered the train. And here the nightmare proper started.
The driver’s cab was relatively undamaged, but through that into the carriage proper, the true scale of the horror became apparent. The floor of the aisle between the seats was passable with care, but was slick with blood and human remains. Bodies and larger human remains were piled all along the seats on either side, with little yellow signs saying ‘DEAD’ on most of the recognisably human ones. Up to the first set of doors (I think they were still present though damaged), and on along the aisle, more bodies piled on seats, more yellow signs, and the floor getting more difficult to walk on – with no handrails, etc. to hold on to, all being missing or detached by the blast. And so up to the second set of doors – all of which were missing, blown out onto the track where the tunnel widened out into the underground junction, a little further down the train. The blast had happened in the wider part, before the train came to a halt with the first carriage now into the narrow tunnel. All of the train windows were missing, blown out with the explosion, and at the standing area where the doors had been, there was clearly a depression in the floor of the train – except that it was approximately flat with the remaining floor, being full of more or less compacted apparent human remains (much as Richard had described to me earlier). Which made it hard to tell how big or deep it was, and walking around it was an exercise in not slipping over, with not much to hold onto, all the handrails missing or detached as described above. The aisle on the other side of this second standing area was much the same, slippery underfoot, with more bodies and more yellow stickers piled up along both sides, up to the end door of the carriage into the next one along.
Not much further along the train (maybe the second carriage?), where the tunnel was much wider, and other tracks merged, access was available into the train from the side doors. Beyond the first carriage, the train was pretty much intact, with no more bodies or obvious human remains, although there was certainly more evidence of paramedic activity. The doors were all open now, allowing access out onto the track, where the first carriage had been when the blast occurred.
And so out onto the tracks, now in the wide part of the tunnel, where other tracks met and went off down other tunnels. First we got out on the wide side, where the other tracks were, though it was also possible to get out on the other side, where the tunnel wall was, which was now further away from the side of the train. We would come back to that. So, on the tracks side, as we got out we saw quite a bit of debris, including the doors – and more bodies, perhaps three or four. Clearly this was where the front carriage had been when the blast occurred, and, as the bomb had been in the standing area, by the doors, when the doors had blown out, so had some of the passengers who had been standing there. As I recall, these bodies showed mostly very similar damage to those inside the carriage, in particular traumatic amputations to the lower limbs. Although in no way a medical assessment, observing injuries to bodies close to an explosion can give important information in an explosives context, with high explosives causing recognisable and specific injuries to bodies, including traumatic amputation of limbs, generally with charring of the flesh close to where the amputations occur. And this damage generally only occurs when a body is close to the explosive when it detonates, really only within a very few feet, depending on the size of the charge. So these people had been very close to the explosion, and it appeared to have been at or around floor level.
Now we re-entered the carriage, and went out down on the other side of the train, next to the tunnel wall. And along here was perhaps, for me anyway, the most difficult sight of all. So far, most of the dead had been close to the blast, and were severely damaged, as already described. In addition to the bodily injuries, again when very close to a high explosive blast, clothing tends to be also very badly damaged, both torn/shredded but also charred and sooted. So as cold as it sounds, I was able to focus on them all as ‘bodies’ rather than people, and keep my concentration on what I needed to be looking for in terms of information useful to the police, and not be distracted by the human devastation I was seeing. I was also very conscious of needing to stay calm for Sharon and Sarah, and indeed Rob, and make sure they were managing OK and not, for instance, being overwhelmed and needing to go back up to the street. This could very easily have been the case for any of us, and cause for absolutely no criticism whatsoever. But so far, so good, and we all seemed to be coping.
And then Sharon and I (I don’t think Sarah, maybe she didn’t get out with us on this side) came upon a new sight. A man was almost neatly wrapped around one of the train wheels, but in this case he was, at first sight, completely intact, along with the clothes he was wearing – a light blue suit as I recall. And now this was very hard to look at, because he was so clearly a real person, who had, if possible, an even more horrific end than some of the others, for many of whom at least, death would have been, if not instantaneous, then at least very quick. This person must have been standing on the other side of the standing area, against the doors, with a number of people between him and the bomb, so he would have been shielded quite effectively from the immediate blast. But then when the doors went out, he had clearly been pushed out with them, most likely still fully conscious, and relatively uninjured. He had then fallen to the track and was ultimately caught up in a train wheel and rolled around it as the train stopped. I remember thinking his head looked a slightly strange shape, but otherwise he looked outwardly quite undamaged.
This image will stay with me forever, but around that, mercifully, I am quite hazy. I’m fairly sure I said something to Sharon along the lines of, “He’s clearly not explosi
vely damaged, we’ll just note that, and where he is, and move right along” – i.e. back into the carriage and the slightly more tolerable carnage.
I’m also fairly sure that we took one or more explosive testing kits down with us, which we used on some parts of the inside of the carriage, although that was always going to be a forlorn hope, since blood and human tissue will fairly comprehensively mask or degrade small explosives traces. But still it needed to be done, so we looked for the cleanest surfaces we could find, close to the seat of the explosion and swabbed there, for later examination at the lab. We may also have swabbed the detached doors, though I can’t remember for sure. It seems to me (now at least) that that would have been a good place to swab, though in the end it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, given the nature of the explosive it later transpired was used – but we knew nothing of that at the time.
And then, having got some samples, and a fairly clear picture of what we had to deal with, we all headed back to the surface, to take stock, and decide how to proceed from there.
Here seems like a good place for some musings on dealing with something like this, I mean on an emotional level, not in a forensic context. Now it may be thought that, working in the forensic explosives field, such a scene was not a new experience for me – indeed my department head even made a comment along those lines to me, when he saw me a day or two later! It was meant in the best way, but still, it showed either a lack of understanding of how bad these scenes really were, or of what the work of an explosives forensic scientist (in the UK at any rate), was generally like (or probably a bit of both). But within my twenty years to that point, mass casualty bombings of civilians had never occurred on the UK mainland. Certainly, I had encountered dead bodies, some explosively damaged, but I had never experienced anything even approaching this scene.
Now some organisations, certainly today, would automatically require their staff exposed to something like this, to attend counselling afterwards, but that was less so at the time, and certainly wasn’t the case for Dstl. So do I think that should be/should have been the case? If it’s automatic, then probably I would say no – people are all different, there is no one solution for everyone. It’s a very complex matter and one issue, among many, is timing. People’s reactions can be very different, and particularly they can occur at very different times after such an event, so simply saying “you’ve seen this, now go have some counselling”, is probably not a very effective approach. However, such support should certainly be offered, but more on the basis of if or when an individual feels they need it, and for an indefinite period into the future, which could even be years. Of course, the trouble with this is that (a) you might not realise until damage is done, that you do need some help; and (b) you might feel some stigma attached to asking for help. So, as well as the offer of help, there needs to be some system of watching out for possible signs of issues arising amongst those potentially affected.
As I said, Dstl had no system of any kind in place at the time, although it was made clear to everyone that help could be provided through occupational health at any time, if anyone should request it. However, it seemed to me that the best help at the time was for people to just sit and talk about it with each other as and when they wished. I did make a point of watching out for signs of any trouble for a while afterwards, particularly for Richard, who I thought at the time showed that he might have been the most affected. Though what do I know? That may just indicate that he had a more healthy reaction to it all than the rest of us! At any rate, I am unaware of anyone suffering any significant after-effects from these scenes – and thank God for that.
Personally? My approach was to largely just put it out of my mind and concentrate on the job in hand. One thing I did notice was that, in the days that followed, naturally the papers were full of what had happened, and much of that was the human stories of the many people who had been there, and I consciously avoided any and all such articles and pictures. Really an extension of what I was doing in the tunnel, keeping it all as just ‘people’, and staying away from thinking in terms of the victims as actual individuals with lives and families and all the rest. And pretty much this seemed to work for me. Well, so far so good anyway. One thing I do now entirely understand is how, for instance, many soldiers will not talk about bad things they have seen with their families and loved ones, even when exhorted to do so. The fact is, that faced with something that bad, the very last people you want to talk to about it, are those you love most – simply because it is so awful; the last thing you want to do is put any of that on them. So I go back to what I said above – if talking is necessary, and I’m sure that it mostly is a beneficial thing to do at some point – then it should be to someone, or a group, who was either there with you, or at least has experienced something similar.
So – back out of the tunnel, to the SO15 wagon. “OK, now you’ve seen it – what can you tell us, Cliff!?” Crunch time. And in my head I’m thinking, “Erm, well, looks like a bomb has gone off down there.” Still in protective, ‘don’t think about the human horror’ mode, but the time for any kind of levity, no matter what the reason, was long since past. Giving myself a moment to focus, I gave my opinion that several kilograms of a high explosive had detonated, at or about floor level in the standing area of the second set of doors in from the front of the first carriage. So far, so uncontroversial, and still not especially helpful for the police, for whom the burning question was – was this a suicide bombing, or has someone left a device and is out there maybe getting ready to set another one?
It may seem that my answer thus far was, in practice, no different to that first thought in my head as above. But, getting technical for a minute, that’s actually not true. I was saying it’s a high explosive – that means it needs a detonator to make it work. Detonators are hard to come by in the UK even more so than high explosives. It also means that it was not any kind of pressure device, not a pipe bomb, not a pressure cooker or anything similar, and not any kind of pyrotechnic (i.e. firework) type of main charge – which are a class of materials known as low explosives. So it did give the police some information, just not the really crucial bit that they wanted right then.
Now, with my fingers and all other available appendages firmly crossed, I said my best opinion at that time was that it probably was a suicide bomber, then hurriedly added all the usual good forensic science caveats. Knowing full well that at that moment, such caveats would be politely received and then quickly filed under ‘never mind all that’. A stretch though it was, this opinion was not entirely unfounded. In particular, there was one body I had noted that seemed particularly badly damaged. Most of the bodies had severe trauma, and traumatic amputations to their lower bodies, also to the lower trunk, but facially they had been largely intact. Whereas, this one body seemed to have suffered more damage to the trunk, but also had pretty much no face left. Unfortunately, as a necessary consequence of the rescue operation, bodies and materials had been moved around to provide access, and this also meant that their position thereafter, could not be used to help work out the actual sequence of events. Clearly, I had not examined, or even properly seen, all the bodies that were there, but still, this one had stood out to me. I was confident that the device had been at floor level (i.e. not being carried at chest or back height), and I could see this kind of damage being sustained if someone was crouching down next to it, perhaps to trigger it.
And so, on that limited basis I gave my opinion. Fortunately it turned out to be correct, though clearly the police were still alive to the possibility that there were still others out there, intent on doing something similar.
I also talked to Hazel and Sarah L at the other Tube scenes, and Kim at the bus. I can’t remember if any of them felt able to give opinions about suicide bombers at that point, but they were clearly similar types of devices, and nothing to argue against the suicide scenario, so I think the working assumption by the police by then was that they were all suicid
e bombs.
By this time, it was somewhere around midnight, so I thought it was probably time we headed home. Umm… well now, it’s all very well (and speaking personally, quite fun) getting a fast police ride to a scene, but then comes the question – how do you get back home!? The police are very good at getting you somewhere they want you to be. But taking you back, well that just isn’t a priority! And to be fair the whole force was quite preoccupied at that point. And clearly there was no public transport. OK, yes they would get us a ride back – but it might take a while. I can remember sitting with Sharon on some steps to a building near the Tube entrance, just waiting. I remember just chatting, which seems quite banal considering the enormity of what we had spent the day dealing with, but probably the best way of coping, at least at that time. I can’t actually remember if Rob or Sarah were also there then – maybe they were, but also maybe they had got a ride back earlier. I could check, but that’s not the point of this article – and an interesting example (to me anyway) of the vagaries of human memory in general, and mine in particular. Anyway, I think we eventually got a ride at about 01.30, so I probably actually got home about 03.00.
