‘I forgive them. What else is there?’
Manchester bomb survivor on 999 failures
A survivor of the Manchester Arena bombing says he has no anger over the failures of the emergency services despite a scathing report into the inadequate response.
Piotr Chylewski lost an eye and was in a coma for five days after the 2017 attack. He almost died during one of nine operations to rebuild his shattered body but the 51-year-old engineer said he does not share the dismay of some survivors and victims’ families.
Twenty-two people died in the terrorist attack, including Hebridean teenager Eilidh MacLeod, and a report published last week laid bare serious failures in the 999 response.
However, Chylewski accepts their apologies, adding: “It is easy to sit at a desk and read the reports and then say, ‘oh, that was wrong, this was wrong, that was wrong’. Maybe if they had been better prepared, then some people might have survived, but who can be sure? I keep my mind forward. I don’t like going back again, I could maybe drop myself mentally. I don’t see any point in taking people to court or sending people to jail from the emergency services.
“It’s easy to blame people but this was a shock for everyone, the police, the fire service, the ambulance service. Of course they maybe watched some movies about this sort of thing before and were maybe prepared somehow, but action is action.
“It’s easy to blame afterwards, that’s my point of view. Even if they knew what to do, I’m not sure they would be prepared mentally. It’s important that they have training for the people in these situations.”
Chylewski had gone to collect his wife and daughter from the Ariana Grande concert when he was caught in the blast from Salman Abedi five years ago.
He was in a coma for five days as medics in Manchester fought to keep him alive. He sustained serious injuries to his legs, feet, torso and head, losing an eye and most of his teeth.