‘We saw a man with mud all across his back’
Shortly after 4pm, armed police and dog handlers arrived at the police cordon to begin searches of streets that had earlier been sealed off.
Four police marksmen and one handler with a German shepherd dog searched gardens outside a block of flats on MacFarlane Road.
The officers slowly and cautiously moved around the outside of the premises, but it was not initially clear what they were searching for.
One witness said he had seen police teams and officers from the parks constabulary conduct sweeps of Shepherd’s Bush Green with sniffer dogs.
He said: “There were several sniffer dogs and officers very carefully working their way around the park. One woman nearby was in tears and said that she had been evacuated from the Tube station and had seen dozens of packages outside. Police at the Tube station appeared to be concentrating on an area to the left of the entrance where it appeared they were examining an item.”
The searches may have been prompted by Hussain Salman, a mechanic originally from Baghdad who works in a repair shop underneath the Tube line. He said he and colleagues reported a suspicious man to police.
Mr Salman, now a British national who lives locally, said he saw a man acting in a strange manner close to the station earlier that morning. “The man wasn’t quite white and wasn’t quite black, he was very well-built, like a bodybuilder, and we saw that he had mud all across his back, just like someone had pushed him in a garden,” he said.
“I looked at him and thought there was something that just wasn’t quite right, there was something odd about him. I’m an Iraqi but I have a British wife and this is my country now, so if I see something like that I will always tell the police, which I did. I’m not sure if this was the man involved, but he looked very suspicious and not long after I saw him was when the bomb happened.”
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
