IT is almost 20 years since Clive Holland stood among the victims of Britain’s first Islamist suicide attack, and the memory still reduces the former soldier to tears.
He was one of Scotland Yard’s detectives investigating the 7/7 bombings that brought carnage to London on July 7, 2005, leaving 52 commuters dead and more than 700 injured.
Three bombs exploded on the Underground and a fourth blew up a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square.
One went off in the first carriage of Piccadilly Line train 311 near Russell Square station, killing 27 passengers including teenage suicide bomber Germaine Lindsay.
Hours later, detective constable and anti-terrorist squad investigator Clive found himself alone in the carriage among the bodies.
In a four-part BBC documentary starting tomorrow, the retired officer says: “Going down to the Underground I wasn’t nervous because I’d done 22 years in the Army, so I’ve seen quite a lot.
“The initial first couple of carriages was fine, there was a lot of property left behind. And then we got to the main carriage.”
Choking back tears, he remembers: “There was a lot of bodies inside, just blown to pieces.”
Remarkably the train lights were still working, but the investigators needed more illumination, so Clive was left alone with the dead while his colleagues collected more lights.
He says: “So I was just chatting to them, telling them, ‘We’re here now. Everything is going to be OK.
“‘I’m really sorry what has happened but we’re going to get you back to your loved ones as quickly as we can, and we’ll treat you with as much dignity as possible’.
“They were innocent, just going along with their normal lives, and all of a sudden it changed.”
Clive, shown working in the carriage with colleagues in these exclusive pictures, added: “We got the bodies out, then all the property on the train, like bags and backpacks, had to be bagged, photographed and taken upstairs.
“That’s when the phones started to go. They picked up the signal, all the text messages started coming through and phones were ringing.
“It was family members ringing — husbands, wives, mothers. It shocked me because I’d never even given that a thought.
“We just left them in the bags and they were taken away. What could I have said if I’d answered?”
One of those desperate mothers phoning and constantly leaving messages was Julie Nicholson, whose daughter Jenny was killed when Mohammad Sidique Khan detonated the second bomb, in a Circle Line carriage near Edgware Road station.
Julie says: “I was leaving messages constantly for Jenny on her phone and texting, even though deep, deep down I knew I might not get a response. But the human spirit needs to hope.”
Days later a police officer came to the family’s home in Bristol to confirm that Jenny, 24, who worked for a music publisher, was one of six passengers killed in the Edgware Road blast.
At the time, Julie was a priest and she travelled to London to hold Jenny’s hand and anoint her dead daughter with oil. She also attended a vigil with the relatives of the other victims.
She tells the documentary: “After the two-minute silence, I decided to go home.
“I made my way to the nearest Tube station and I got to the entrance and I just couldn’t walk over the threshold.
“I started to panic. I’ve never had a panic attack but I felt I was about to have one when a taxi pulled up to let somebody out.
“And I grabbed the door and said, ‘You’ve got to take me please. I just can’t be here any longer’.
“He looked at me and said, ‘OK, get in’. We set off and he said, ‘Did you know somebody? You know, were you involved?’
“I found myself telling him about Jenny. We pulled up at Paddington Station and he looked in his mirror at me.
“He said, ‘Are you ready for this?’ The station was heaving.”
The cabbie asked Julie where she was going and when she said Bristol he replied,
“Well, sit back, I’m driving you. I was going to my sister’s home in Reading anyway’.”
She adds: “I thought, ‘This is going to cost a couple of hundred pounds’. So I messaged my sister and said, ‘We need cash’.
“When we pulled up, he asked me if I had a photograph of my daughter. I gave him a photo of Jenny and he put it on his dashboard.
“I said, ‘How much do I owe you?’ and he said, ‘You don’t owe me anything. This is my gift. I just would like you to do something for me’.
“I thought, ‘Oh crikey’, and he said, ‘Just remember that there are more good people in the world than bad’. And that was it, he was gone.
“The next day I thought, ‘I must find him. I must thank him properly’, and could never find him. In 20 years I have never been able to find him. It’s as if he didn’t exist, but he did.”
Eight months after the explosion, Julie gave up being a priest because she could not forgive Jenny’s killer.
But for father-of-five Bill Mann, who had been in the same carriage as Jenny, his attitude to life changed for ever when the bomb went off.
He says: “My first memory is being thrown through the air towards the opposite doorway, thinking, ‘Is this it? Do I die early?’.
“In that moment when the bomb was ripping through the carriage, I had absolute clarity on what is important in life to me. Obviously it was my family, the people in my life.
“All the stuff that we normally concern ourselves with, such as jobs and careers and houses and money, just didn’t factor.
“It gave me a really acute sense of perspective in terms of what’s important. To this day I cling on to that.”
Bill recalls burning embers shooting past his eyes and fragments of glass from the shattered windows flying through the air.
He says: “A brief moment of silence, then the screaming started. I can remember distinctly two different types of screams.
“There were the screams of people who were hysterical because they didn’t know what was going on.
“There were the real guttural screams of people who were seriously injured and dying.”
Bill, 60, from Brentwood, Essex, gave up his job in IT for a finance firm and is now a life and executive coach helping people.
He says: “I’ve had 20 years that I might not have had.
“It just makes you realise how precious every single day is.”
I ask Bill what he thinks of the four suicide bombers — Khan, Lindsay and their accomplices Shehzad Tanweer and Hasib Hussain.
He replies: “If they were still living I’d probably feel completely different.
“But because I know they died there and then, I’ve not given them any thought whatsoever.
“They didn’t manage to progress their cause at all. It was just completely futile because whatever they were hoping to achieve, they achieved nothing.”
MARTINE WRIGHT lost both legs in the first explosion, on a Circle Line train near Aldgate Tube station at 8.49am on Thursday, July 7.
She also lost 80 per cent of the blood in her body and was in an induced coma for eight days.
Mum Martine, now 52, tells the documentary how she found out about the scale of the atrocity from The Sun.
She says: “I remember waking, it was dark. I asked the Intensive Care nurse, ‘Where am I?’
“And he said, ‘I’ve got to tell you that you were in an accident on the Tube and your legs got very injured’.
“I managed to lift my head a little bit, and I remember this waffle blanket – you would expect it to go down your legs.
“It literally stopped half way and there was nothing. Half my body had been amputated.
“I remember being taken into this room. The Sun newspaper had been left there.
“As I got closer to it, I could see these individual 52 passport photos all lined up on the front of the newspaper.
“Then I realised that all those people on the front of that paper had been killed that day – 52 people.
“It wasn’t an accident that day on the Tube, it was a bomb.”
Martine, of Manningtree, Essex, went on to compete in the 2012 London Paralympics in sitting volleyball, was awarded the MBE in 2016 and even took up parachuting.
