12:01

Rory Rigney said he had just got on the tube train – one of the last to board – when the explosion happened only a few feet away.

“I thought, ‘Did someone smash something?’ It sounded like a smash, then I heard a scream and thought ‘it’s someone having a fight’. Then I saw the fireball coming towards me – yellow or orange. My face still feels warm. I wasn’t hanging around to get a better look at it,” he told reporters.

Rigney added: “It smelled like a fire extinguisher and there was this foam on the floor. It looked like foam from a fire extinguisher. And he described seeing “red wires” coming out of the bucket in the Lidl plastic bag.

The 37-year-old from Dublin said he saw one woman who “looked like she had been burnt – they were pouring water on her face – and an older couple who weren’t as bad”.

He described jumping off the train through the still-open doors as the fireball came towards him.

The explosion, he said, “wasn’t massively loud but then there was a scream and then I looked down the corridor and there was a big flash of light coming down and my immediate reaction was just to jump”.

Rigney told reporters: “The doors were still open, so I jumped out and tried to get as far away as possible, got on the ground and covered myself. I looked back and, obviously, there were so many people trying to get out they were falling on top of each other, so there was a bit of a crush at the door. People were just panicking getting away and there was a lot of screaming.

“For the next, probably, 30 seconds, a minute, people were just getting on the ground. They didn’t know what to do, there was a lot of fear. I think about a minute or so passed, people [were] wondering actually what happened. We couldn’t say what kind of bang it was. There was still a smell ... No one was sure if it was an electrical explosion just from something on the train, so no one was – at that stage – thinking anything more sinister than that.

“We just stayed around and people were grabbing their bags and phones from the train ... then we were being told to get off the platform, so that was ... up to five minutes till then and, at that stage, when we started moving down the stairs, we also saw the armed police coming up the other side.

“When we got out, the emergency services were there ... and they were starting to cordon off the area and police were starting to take interviews from any people on the train who had information.”

