Evening Standard: BOMBERS WILL NOT BEAT ME

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Evening Standard, The (London, England) - August 4, 2005

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• Author/Byline: Ed Harris, Kathrine Barney

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A SURVIVOR of the 7/7 blasts today vowed to defy the terrorists who have crippled him.

 

Garri Holness, 36, said he felt pity for the suicide bombers and spoke vividly about the explosion on the Tube train between King's Cross and Russell Square.

 

Despite losing his left leg, which had to be amputated, Mr Holness, said: "I feel like I've been blessed."

 

He added: "I've had counselling and support and I will use that in the future."

 

Of his determination to beat the bombers, he added: "If I have a bad day then they have won. I do not let myself have a bad day or get down." Sitting up in his bed at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, Mr Holness, of Croydon, told of the chaos in the immediate aftermath of the blast.

 

He remembered a girl shouting: "My leg! My leg." Mr Holness said: "That made me look down at my own leg. My left foot was at a funny angle.

 

"I thought two trains had collided. I was holding on to the rail, my head was smacking against it. I remember holding on and thinking I must stay focused."

 

Mr Holness said he needed skin grafts and that if those were successful, he would be "on the road to recovery".

 

He described the bombers as

 

"warped individuals with no life", adding: "They are brainwashed individuals. I feel sorry for them, in a sense.

 

"Apparently some of them have families, with babies on the way."

 

He continued: "They need a brain to tell them what they're doing is not right. It doesn't make sense to me. I don't hate them. What's done is done."

 

Mr Holness told the BBC: "The people who brainwashed them and got them to do this are the people I hate.

 

"Those people are turning normal people against Muslims because they've taken sections of the Koran, little sections of it, and watered it down and brainwashed individuals to get them to believe it is correct.

 

It's not correct."

 

The bombers were not genuine martyrs, Mr Holness said. "They are not martyrs: they are not going anywhere.

 

They are not going to heaven, if they believe that, because they've killed innocent individuals - not anyone that's done anything to them.

 

"It's not an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, that doesn't work here.

 

These are innocent people that haven't done anything. I don't believe in any of that martyr palave