Trini sees London bus explode

FORMER Intercol footballer, Omari Murray, escaped death in the bomb blast which blew up a London bus, killing 13 people last Thursday at Tavistock Square. A group linked to al Qaeda detonated four bombs in terrorist attacks across Inner London which killed 50 people and injured 700. Caught up in the incident was Arima resident Murray, who in 1998 played midfield for St Augustine Senior Comprehensive’s “Green Machine,” and who had attended Fatima College from 1991 to 1996. He shared his horrifying experience with Sunday Newsday, speaking from his lodgings in Lewisham, London, where he is studying for ACCA qualification and working as an accounting assistant at a National Health Service (NHS) department at King’s Cross. Murray was travelling on London’s underground railway, the “tube,” when passengers were made to disembark after a supposed power-surge, which was later found to be the effect of a bomb blast on the tube.

He was ordered off the tube at Waterloo Station and decided to take a bus to work, but did not know this bus ride would take him close to death. “I was in the front seat of the bus. I was late for work and was watching traffic to see if it was moving. Everything was at a standstill. “Another bus was coming down the road towards me. It was a Hackney Wick bus. It was about three or four car lengths in front of us. “Suddenly the top of the bus exploded. There was a lot of smoke and dust and papers flying around. I saw two bodies fly out of the bus. I quickly got out of my bus. I felt it might explode too. “I saw the bus before and after it exploded. The bus just opened up. It was very shocking. It just ripped off; one solid rip off.

“The air was smelling bad. I don’t know what chemical it was. My nose was burning from the smoke. “We heard a loud explosion and saw greyish-green air inside the bus, and then it just opened up.” He saw the top of the double-decker bus blown off. “I felt the vibration where I was.” Just before the bus explosion, he said, a man next to him on his bus had been told over his cell phone about an explosion in the tube, and so everyone now decided to run out of this bus. Murray got a shock, looking at the bombed bus. “On the top part of the bus was a dead guy hanging over the top of the bus. His cell phone was still in his hand. He looked like he was part of the bus. He was wearing a grey sweater. He was European with long straight hair and was probably in his late 20s.

“I looked at the ground and saw this woman, just her torso and head. She had no arms or legs. They had been blown off. She was dead. Her handbag was still on her. She looked half African half Indian, like a Dougla. “Her arm was blown off from the elbow, and the bone from the top part of her arm was sticking out.  Her arm-bone was upraised and around it was wrapped the strap from her handbag. The handbag lay on her chest.” He said her torso looked wide enough to suggest she had about two or three children. She was wearing a short-sleeved blouse with grey and black patterns. So, how did he feel seeing this dead woman? “I couldn’t believe it, that it had actually happened, and what could happen to someone.

I thought that her family didn’t know what had just happened to her, and I wondered how are they going to deal with it? She is an innocent woman going to work. How’s her family going to take it? It could have been me. I started to shake. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I just walked. “It really struck home. She looked so normal, yet this is what someone did to her without even thinking about other people. I started thinking. “She got up early to go to work, probably begged someone for money to struggle to go to work and get her bus pass, and this is what happened! It’s sad. It’s sickening. That could have been my mother, or me. How would my mother take it? It made me treasure my life.” Murray reflected that traffic had been at a standstill when the ill-fated bus had exploded about three or four car lengths from his bus. “If the traffic had been moving, I would have been closer to the bomb. I would not be here now talking to you!”