'Bomber Looked Petrified'

Updated:13:45, Friday July 22, 2005

Eyewitnesses have told of their face-to-face encounter with the suspected suicide bomber.

Mark Whitby said he was sitting on the Tube at Stockwell when the man ran in to the carriage.

Eyewitness: "We've been so lucky"

He described suddenly hearing people shouting "get down, get down".

Mr Whitby said: "An Asian guy ran on to the train. As he ran, he was hotly pursued by what I knew to be three plain-clothes police officers.

"As the man got on the train I looked at his face. He looked from left to right, but he basically looked like a cornered rabbit, like a cornered fox.

"He looked absolutely petrified.

"He half-tripped, was half-pushed to the floor.

"One of the police officers was holding a black automatic pistol in his left hand. They held it down to him and unloaded five shots into him. I saw it. He's dead, five shots, he's dead."

"I'm totally distraught," he added. "It was no more than five yards away from where I was sitting as I saw it with my own eyes."

Mr Whitby said the suspected bomber "looked like a Pakistani" and was wearing a baseball cap and a thick coat.

He added: "He was quite large, big built, quite a sort of chubby guy."

Teri Godly, who was also in the carriage when the suspected bomber boarded, said: "A tall Asian man with a beard and a rucksack got on after me. 

"Then about eight or nine police with shotguns boarded after him and started shouting to us all 'get out, get out of the station'.

"People started screaming and we all started running quite calmly up the stairs. There were six or seven gun shots behind us. It was very surreal. No one was pushing or shoving. We were in a state of shock.

"It was only afterwards that I realised how lucky we had been."

Chris Wells, a 28-year-old company manager, said he was travelling on the Victoria Line towards Vauxhall when he left the train at Stockwell.

He saw about 20 police officers, some of them armed, rushing into the station before a man jumped over the barriers with police giving chase.

He said: "There were at least 20 officers and they were carrying big black guns.

"The next thing I saw was this guy jump over the barriers and the police officers were chasing after him and everyone was just shouting 'get out, get out'."