MUSLIM witnesses have told of the panic that gripped passengers on the Warren Street Tube train yesterday.
Mohammed Alum, 30, a retail manager from Bethnal Green, East London, said a burning smell began to drift through his carriage.
He said: “I had just dropped off my wife at her office near Oxford Street and was heading to my office in Camden, North London. She is expecting our second child and so I thought that I would escort her to work and have a quick bite to eat before carrying on to my office.
“I left her in a very good mood — the sun was shining and we had a sandwich for lunch in a leafy square — but like most people who take the Tube these days, I was worried about getting on the Underground again.
“Although I was not caught in an explosion two weeks ago, I was stuck in the dark for 20 minutes on a Northern Line train and have felt panicky on the Tube ever since.
“Sat opposite me was a white woman in her forties with two young children, and next to me was a black man in African dress. We nodded to each other as I got on, in the way that Londoners do a little more often since the bombs.
“As my train pulled out of Warren Street, I heard a sound, like a muffled explosion, to my left and immediately everyone let out a shout, asking what the hell was going on. The woman opposite me hugged her two young children to her, and the black man stood up and rushed to the carriage’s connecting doors to try and see what was going on.
“Then, a smell drifted through the doors of burning plastic. I could not see any smoke, but my eyes began to sting, maybe out of fright. Someone shouted that it was a bomb, and then the panic started. Some people lay on the floor, others started pulling the emergency cord and I said a prayer to myself, while looking around for some way off the train. But the doors to the platform were shut.
“Then, the doors connecting our carriage to the next flew open and a stampede of people came through. Someone fell on the floor but there was no opportunity to help him and he was trodden on. By this stage the doors of the carriage that lead on to the platform were still closed, but then the African man started to wedge them open.
“Everyone was screaming and shouting. All I could think about was my wife and child and my brother, who is ill at the moment, and I began to panic too. I started to push the African man away from the doors but he held my shoulders and told me to calm down.
“The woman with the children was still sitting in her chair and the African man went back to get her. I got her two kids. By the time that we fought our way back to the doors they had been opened and everyone was streaming on to the platform.
“We set the children on to the platform but they were swept up in the mass of people running for the exit.Me and the African man got out into the air at about 1pm and I ran, desperately trying to find a telephone to call my wife. I was so relieved to hear her voice that I could not really speak.
“If these latest bombers also turn out to be Muslims, I hope that they are sent to prison for a very long time. They are not true Muslims. They are criminals, using fear as a weapon.
“I might be shaken up for a few days, but I hope to be on the Tube again in a couple of days. That is how I will show my defiance.”
Sofiane Mohellebi, 35, a Muslim retail worker from Paris who is living in Walthamstow, East London, was also on the train.
He said: “I had been for a job interview in a store this morning, a job that I really wanted to get. I was still thinking about the interview when I boarded the Tube train at Oxford Street, and began heading home. It was a usual afternoon on the Tube, hot, sticky and a little crowded. I managed to get a seat, and there were people from many countries sat around me, including a group of young American women carrying shopping bags from West End clothes stores.
“It is difficult to get on to a Tube carriage without thinking of the bombs two weeks ago, but you push it to the back of your mind. You think that it cannot happen again so soon after the first explosions. I was reading my book on my lap, when we were at Warren Street station, and I heard other people talking about a burning smell. And then I could smell it too. Someone said, ‘Oh no, not again’ and then everyone started to panic. A lot of the women in my carriage left their shoes so they could run along the platform. I began to run with everyone else, trying to get out of the station. I don’t know what came over me, but because all of these women had taken off their shoes so that they could run, I picked them up to return them after I had got outside.
“By the time I reached the open air, the place was surrounded by police. I looked down, and in my hand I had all of these shoes.
“I am a Muslim, and I did think about what is going on in the name of religion. I am angry that people say that this is the way to change the world.”
