A fireman today described the terrifying moment when one of the alleged 21/7 plotters tried to set off a bomb in front of him as he sat on a Tube train.

Angus Campbell, a firefighter for 21 years who is now an instructor, told Woolwich Crown Court, south London, that he was on his way to work in the early afternoon of July 21, 2005, when he took a Northern Line train northbound from Stockwell station in south London.

He said he remembered taking a seat opposite a woman who was trying to get her young child to sit in a buggy when there was a loud explosion. The woman, Nadia Baro, later told the court that in the following minutes, she was convinced she would die

Mr Campbell said: "It was mildly amusing because I have small children and I often struggle with my children. Then what happened was there was an explosion. It was loud. We were in a confined carriage and the explosion was loud."

Mr Campbell said he crouched instantly in his seat and threw an arm over his face, before looking through the smoke and seeing the face of Ramzi Mohammed, one of six men accused of attempting to detonate explosives on London's transport network that day.

Mr Mohammed, who denies the charge, sat fiddling with his pen as Mr Campbell continued his account.

"The first thing I remember seeing is Mr Mohammed, who was screaming and shouting, and there was smoke issuing from behind him, from his back and I think to the floor," he said. "My first reaction was to run away. I wanted to run away. I remember picking up my bag — I had a small rucksack. At some point I’d put it down.

"The woman opposite me was screaming, she was screaming. Mr Mohammed was shouting and there was an awful lot of smoke in the carriage. I wanted to run away but I couldn’t leave her, she was a woman with a small child, she was having problems moving the buggy."

Mr Campbell said that in the following seconds his attention was divided between helping the young woman and her nine-month old son, and trying to work out whether the man he identified as Mr Mohammed was the victim of some kind of accident or something worse.

"At this point I think I was actually shouting at him," he said. "I think I was shouting ’What have you done? What have you done?’ I thought he was in pain, I thought he was a victim."

The firefighter then recounted what he called a nonsensical conversation with the alleged bomber, conducted in thick smoke and over the cacophony of the train alarm and the screams of anxious passengers, in which Mr Mohammed said that the sponge-like debris littering the carriage was bread.

"He was pointing directly at the debris on the floor. And it was nonsensical and it made no sense to me," said Mr Campbell, as the jury watched around a minute of CCTV footage showing him remonstrating with Mr Mohammed and pointing at the floor.

"I was just shouting at him, I was probably being quite vociferous. I was probably swearing," said Mr Campbell, who added that because Mr Mohammed was so worked up he tried to make him lie on the floor. "I shouted at him: ’You are scaring us. I want to help you. I can help you but I want you to lie down,’ because I needed him to be submissive to me."

But his efforts to control Mr Mohammed came to an end when the train pulled into Oval station and the doors rolled open, Mr Campbell said. "He ran to his right, he turned right and I can remember him looking at me as he ran past me. As he went past me, he waved his hand as a sort of sending off gesture — perhaps I could have intercepted him."

"He ran, he ran extraordinarily quickly. He went past me and I shouted after him 'Stop him! Stop him!' A couple of people put out arms but the adrenalin in him was so... intense."

Ms Baro then told the court that when Mr Mohammed's bag exploded, she smelled something "like the smell of oil" and saw a spongey, foamy substance spilling onto the floor with nails in it. "I just realised that something was going on because of what happened on July 7.

"I was in panic and I tried to get away from him," she added. "I was in such a panic. I did not know how a bomb worked and I thought we were going to die now."

The description of Mr Mohammed's alleged attempt to blow himself up and subsequent escape was then taken up by Arthur Burton-Garbett, a 72-year-old former soldier who was in the next-door carriage when the detonator exploded.

Mr Burton-Garbett, a former ammunitions tester and now an antique bookseller from Morden, south London, said he instantly recognised the smell of cordite on the smoke wafting through the train and looked through the carriage windows to watch the man he suspected of being the bomber.

As the train pulled into the Oval, he said he gave chase to Mr Mohammed but was slowed up by a recent gall bladder operation. "Everybody on the platform just stood there," he said. "They just stood there like dummies."

"He just shot out and started to scythe his way through a lot of people," Mr Burton-Garbett told the jury. "When he went up the escalator that was stationary, he went up like an express train. He was about nine to 10 steps ahead of me but about half way up I started to run out of steam."

"I realised that he was gaining and that I couldn’t catch up."

The case continues.

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