Safety protocols 'hampered 7/7 rescue teams'

Survivor Michael Henning yesterday savaged the restrictive safety "protocols" which he said had delayed rescuers from the emergency services, potentially costing the lives of some of the 52 people who died in the bombings.

Mr Henning said he had witnessed people suffering agonising deaths lasting up to 40 minutes without any pain relief, and recalled his anger at seeing three separate groups of firefighters waiting around after he was finally evacuated from the train blown up by Shehzad Tanweer at Aldgate Tube station on July 7, 2005.

The commuter asked each of them: "Why aren't you down there? There are people dying."

He said the firefighters were too embarrassed to look at him or reply, apart from one man who said they were worried about a secondary explosion.

Mr Henning paid tribute to individual rescuers but criticised the rules that stopped them from acting more quickly.

"There were people that may have survived if they had got urgent

medical response there and then," he said.

"My view is even if those who were too severely wounded to ever

survive, some of them died in agony for 20, 30, 40 minutes, and at least they should have had the dignity of some morphine or something of that nature."

Mr Henning, who in 2005 was working as a broker and living in Kensington, west London, added: "In emergency situations there's a reason why there's blue lights and sirens on emergency vehicles, and I know how critical it is. I've even spoken to a doctor who said that with immediate medical response, perhaps 10 per cent of people would have survived."

Yesterday was the first time survivors have given graphic accounts of the horrific aftermath of the Aldgate blast, which killed seven people and left many more seriously injured.

Mr Henning, who was standing in the carriage behind Tanweer, vividly relived the moment when the suicide bomber detonated his device on the eastbound Circle Line train.

He said: "It feels completely real to me now as I speak. I can feel the right hand side of my face because I was standing right on to the explosion. I can feel it tense up now, I can feel heat. It's extremely real.

"One moment you had the sense of reality as you know it, your everyday Tube travel. And the next, it's all changed. I remember the questions in my head – 'What is this? what is this?' – as I'm being twisted and thrown down to the ground. Then I realised it was a bomb."

The commuter described the individuals involved in the rescue effort as "absolutely brilliant" but compared the risk-averse rules of their organisations with the spontaneous courage shown by his grandfather's rescue team in the Blitz.

"They didn't wait until the (German) bombers had left," he said. "They didn't worry about unexploded bombs. They would go in even if the building was on fire."

Fellow passenger Steven Desborough described his desperate attempts to keep horrifically injured passengers alive after the bombing.

The trained first-aider stayed on the stricken train to help the wounded and dying, offering comfort to victims Carrie Taylor and

Richard Ellery in their final moments.

He told the inquest how a doctor, Gerardine Quaghebeur, who was also travelling on the train, expressed frustration at the lack of medical assistance.

Mr Desborough – the last "civilian" survivor to leave the stricken carriage – said it was about 20 minutes before the first member of the emergency services arrived to help.

BOMBERS POSED AS A-TEAM IN PHONE TEXTS

Two of the bombers posed as characters from TV series The A-Team in jokey text messages on the eve of their suicide attacks.

In bizarre exchanges, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Jermaine Lindsay pretended to be Face and BA Baracus.

Using the mobile phones they bought to plan the atrocities, they repeatedly quoted BA Baracus's catchphrase: "I ain't getting on no plane."

There is no suggestion that the plotters were intending to target aircraft, and this could have been a reference to final preparations for the 7/7 attacks.