How a Friday morning commute turned into a journey of terror
The London Underground service that left Wimbledon shortly after 8am was typical of the rush hour trains clattering into the UK capital on a Friday morning – packed with people making a routine commute.
Office workers sat reading with their headphones on, alongside schoolchildren making the short hop of a few stops to their lessons.
Some 12 minutes after the train’s departure as it pulled into the station for the wellheeled west London neighbourhood of Parsons Green, this normality was expunged by a fireball likened by one witness to being as if a “large match” had been struck in its rearmost carriage.
At some point – precisely when was last night the subject of a sprawling, fast-moving police investigation – an individual had left an insulated bag sold by the Lidl supermarket chain by one set of doors and most like- ly departed the train. It is probable that the bag and its contents went entirely unnoticed until an ignition device on a far larger bomb inside sent a sheet of flame up into the carriage, inflicting serious burns on a number of those nearest and sending a wave of panic the length of the train and platform.
Anna Gorniak, who was in the same carriage as the partially-detonated bomb, said: “I could see a fireball filling the carriage and coming our way. At that moment, I started to run. I guess my thought was, ‘OK, is that it or is somebody after us? Is somebody going to come with a gun or with a knife?’. In my mind, I was praying, I probably thought for a second, ‘That’s it, my life is over’.”
In the following hours, it became clear that far greater carnage had been averted because the main charge of the bomb had failed to detonate. But such mercies could have been in no way apparent to those on that train and in the station, for whom the overwhelming instinct was escape.