FATHERS UNITED IN GRIEF
Dads embrace as they search Sri Lanka hospital for children killed in Easter Sunday bomb atrocity
their children in a local hospital. Mr Linsey, 61, said: ‘We hugged and tried to support each other. We helped each other.’
Hours earlier they had been strangers having breakfast in the Table One restaurant at the Shangri-La Hotel in the capital Colombo with their families when it was bombed.
In the first blast, Mr Nicholson’s wife Anita, 42, his son Alex, 14 and daughter Annabel, 11, were all killed instantly.
Investment manager Mr Linsey and his children Daniel, 19, and Amelie, 15, tried to flee, but the teenagers died in a second blast designed to target survivors and any rescuers rushing to their aid.
In a TV interview yesterday, Mr Linsey described his last minutes with his children.
Speaking to CNN in his London garden as eldest son David, 21, held him, Mr Linsey said the bomb was like a ‘wave of pressure’, and told how his children were serving his breakfast when the bomb exploded.
He added: ‘My children were so nice – they actually went down to the buffet and filled up my plate.
‘Then I wanted more to drink. I was going to get it, my daughter said, “No I’ll get it” – and then the bomb went off and they both were running toward me, and I’m not sure whether that’s what killed them or not.
‘I knew there’d be another bomb because there always is.’
He said he wanted to escape as fast as possible with his children but the three of them fled straight into the second blast, adding: ‘ Maybe I should have just stayed and covered them with my body.’
He revealed how he tried to revive Daniel, a student at Westminster Kingsway College, before helping to carry him to an ambulance.
Mr Linsey said: ‘They both were unconscious. My daughter seemed to be moving, my son wasn’t. A woman offered to take my daughter
‘I knew there’d be another bomb’
downstairs to the ambulance – I needed help moving my son.
‘Someone helped me move him down the stairs and they both ended up in the same hospital.’
He added: ‘I lost track of my daughter in the confusion.
‘I went with my son. I yelled and screamed for them to help him. The doctors did try, but the equipment was rudimentary.’
He later found Amelie – a pupil at the Godolphin & Latymer School in Hammersmith, west London – dead in the hospital. It was there that he met Mr Nicholson looking for Alex.
Mr Linsey, who has returned home to central London to be with his wife and other two sons, who were not on the holiday, said he was still in touch with Mr Nicholson, adding: ‘He is a lovely man. I spoke to him today. He is still there trying to organise the repatriation of his family.’
Mr Nicholson, 43, a lawyer from Essex who lives in Singapore, has told how his ‘perfect’ family ‘mercifully died instantly’ with ‘no pain’.
Mr Linsey also described the distressing wait to have his children’s remains returned to him.
The father of four added: ‘I had to send photos of my two children to a doctor in Sri Lanka so he can identify them. I wish they could speed up the repatriation of the bodies.’
Amelie and Daniel were born in Britain but had both US and UK citizenship because their father was born in America. However, Mr Linsey said he felt let down by the support provided by the British Embassy, adding: ‘I’m an American citizen and my children have dual passports. I did ask to see someone from the British Embassy as my children have dual passports, but no one came over. I was disappointed.
‘The US embassy may have had more staff but the ambassador saw me twice. I also had a Marine stay with me and a legal adviser got me out through road blocks with diplomatic plates. We need more communication on the ground.’
The number of people killed in the atrocities in which churches and luxury hotels were targeted has risen to 321 – including 31 foreigners – with more than 500 wounded.
Among the Britons killed were GP Sally Bradley and her husband Bill Harrop, 56, a retired firefighter, who died when the Cinnamon Grand Hotel was bombed. Dr Bradley, sister of peer and former Labour MP Keith Bradley, had been living with her husband in Australia since 2013 but they were due to return to Britain to retire in the Cotswolds. TWO fathers who saw their British children killed in the Sri Lankan terror attacks embraced as they searched for their families in the bloody aftermath of the Easter Sunday bombings. Matthew Linsey told yesterday how he met Ben Nicholson as they searched for