Hi °C | Lo °C Firefighters angrily swore at a paramedic after he refused to take seriously injured 7/7 victims to hospital, an inquest heard yesterday.
Andrew Cumner was in the first ambulance to arrive on the scene of the bombing at Aldgate Tube station in London on July 7, 2005.
A group of firefighters told him he needed to take wounded survivors to hospital for treatment. But he told them he could not because as “incident officer” he had to stay to assess how many more ambulances were needed. The firefighters responded with “hostility and panic”, the inquest for the 52 victims of the attacks heard.
Suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer detonated his device on the second carriage of an eastbound Circle Line train at Aldgate station at about 8.50am on July 7.
Mr Cumner and his colleague Andrea Ray arrived at Aldgate about 20 minutes later.
“As I left the vehicle I could see a number of people outside the station who looked like they were covered in soot,” he said.
The inquest also heard that a senior fire officer told Mr Cumner people had died but there was no mention of urgent medical aid being required underground.
Ben Hay, counsel to the inquests, asked Mr Cumner: “Did anyone expressly ever say to you in those first eight minutes or so ‘we've got very seriously critically injured people on the train. We need paramedics down there'?
The paramedic replied: “No.”
