HERO'S FIRST WORDS
THE cabbie who locked a bomber in his car told rescuers "he tried to blow me up" after stumbling from the vehicle with blood pouring from his neck.
Security guard Darren Knowles, 50, raced to help hero taxi driver David Perry after terrorist Emad Al Swealmeen set off his bomb at the Liverpool Women’s Hospital.
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Reliving the horror of the Remembrance Day bomb blast, Darren told how the driver stumbled from his taxi with blood pouring from his ear and neck and screamed: "I want my wife."
Darren told the : "David was just so disorientated and confused. He was trying to tell us, 'there is a passenger, there is a passenger’.
"I was trying to say to him, ‘is he still in there’, and he was saying, ‘he has tried to blow me up, he has tried to blow me up’."
Darren was on duty at the hospital when the bomber struck at 10.59am on Sunday.
He was standing by his own car, parked just yards from the main entrance.
"It all happened in a flash. I was just pumping my tyre up on my car. I saw the taxi pull up as they do," he said.
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"I heard a loud bang and thought it was mechanical failure in the taxi. I thought the engine had caught fire.
"But then I saw the taxi driver run out. He was panicking and screaming, ‘someone has blown me up’."
Darren, who lives with his partner and two of their three children, said blood was pouring out of David’s left ear from a shrapnel injury in the back of his neck.
He said: "I grabbed him and tried to get him to safety as quickly as possible because I had a feeling something else was going to go off.
"He was screaming, panicking. We were just saying, ‘calm down, let’s just see to you'.
"I handed him over to a nurse. He went into the staff entrance and sat down there and that was the last I saw of him."
The cabbie, who has been praised by Boris Johnson for acting with "incredible presence of mind and bravery", was treated in hospital after fleeing the car just before it burst into flames.
Darren said he immediately thought the explosion was a terror attack - but "couldn’t say the words because we did not want to scare people".
'I WAS JUST DOING MY JOB'
Despite the blast, he carried on his shift on Sunday, finishing at midnight and was back in work the following morning for a shift at another site.
He said: "Everyone is calling me a hero but I was just doing my job."
David's proud uncle, Michael Sultan, said the family in Kirkdale, Liverpool, was over the moon he was safe - adding he was lucky to be helped by Darren.
Mr Sultan said: “He was semi-conscious after the blast. His face was bruised, his hair was burnt and his ear drums were perforated.
"A passerby from the hospital came over and moved him away from the cab.
"Otherwise he would have gone up in flames. He was very lucky."
Al Swealmeen, an Iraqi whose initial asylum appeal was rejected, died in Sunday’s attack.
Liam Spencer, a former worker at WHSmith inside Liverpool Women's Hospital, described the moment he saw the bomber engulfed in flames.
He told the : "I went back to the car because I was asking if anyone else in the car, but I don't think they quite understood what I was saying because everyone was in shock.
"I ran back to check and that's when I saw the man in the car. He was on fire."
He added: "I initially went close to see if I could grab him because the flames weren't as big at that point.
"As I got close the flames engulfed him and that's when I ran to go and get a fire extinguisher and then the security came out with one."
According to , counterterrorism detectives believe the bomber had experimented with a 7/7-style device as he gathered explosive materials over several months.
Sources said the bomber had tried to construct his device using primary and secondary explosives to magnify the blast, with one designed to set off another - meaning the carnage could have been much worse.
A security source said a theory was that the bomb had gone off accidentally as the driver pulled over to drop Al Swealmeen outside the hospital.
Meanwhile, police found "several suspicious packages" after raiding a pub and asylum hostel linked to the terrorist.
POLICE RAID
The bomb squad sealed off an address linked to Emad Al-Swealmeen, on Sutcliffe Street before extending it to Boaler Street in the city on Wednesday.
This week, Home Office minister Damian Hinds said it was not clear if the hospital was the intended target before Al Swealmeen blew himself up in a taxi.
He added counter-terror chiefs do not believe he was part of a "Liverpool cell" and cops are not looking for anyone else at this stage.
Al Swealmeen - who The Sun understands was a Jordanian national - moved to the UK in 2014 and told people he was from Syria.
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After his asylum claim was rejected he is said to have been sectioned under the Mental Health Act for brandishing a knife near Liverpool's city centre.
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Taxi blown up in Liverpool attack removed from scene
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