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7/7 father tells Met simulation how body ID must be faster
Miranda Bryant and Justin Davenport12 Oct 2009
The father of a victim of the 7/7 bombings told of the agonising delay in identifying his daughter.
As police staged a training exercise on the Tube at the weekend, John Taylor, 60, whose 24-year-old daughter Carrie was killed by a suicide bomber at Aldgate in 2005, described how it took 10 days for he and his wife to discover their child had died in the terror bombings.
Around 200 officers from the Met and the British Transport Police took part in training at the weekend to improve their handling of mass casualty incidents. The force is engaged in a series of exercises to prepare for terror-type scenarios in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics.
In 2006 a Government report found there were a series of failings in the emergency response to the July 7 bombings including delays in identifying victims and failures to keep families informed.
Commander Simon Foy, in charge of the Met's Homicide and Serious Crime command, said the force needed to “pay attention” to the way it handles identifying bodies and making sure it keeps families briefed, which he said “previously haven't gone well all the time”.
At the weekend the Met staged a feud between two sets of football fans which resulted in a Tube train being petrol bombed and a man being stabbed outside the station.
Using life-like latex bodies and hundreds of props, the aftermath of an explosion was re-created in a Tube carriage in a tunnel at a station in central London.
Officers had to find 26 items of forensic interest and log and label them as they would be expected to in real life.
Mr Taylor was invited to speak to the officers to emphasise the importance of speeding up the identification process.
He described how, with his wife June, he had to drive from hospital to hospital in 2005 as police would not give them any information on their daughter.
It took 10 days for the couple, from Billericay, Essex to have confirmation their daughter was dead. Mr Taylor told the Standard: “For the first few days we were on our own and we didn't know what to do or who to contact… We didn't know whether Carrie was in hospital, wandering around.
“It was the not knowing, not having the information. That's what I told the police on Friday.
“Our family liaison officers stuck with us throughout… but for some of the families they said their FLO wasn't as good as ours and disappeared after two weeks,” he added.
Met detective superintendent Matthew Horne said: “If we lose the confidence of families and catch murderers, we've failed — we need to do both.”
He said: “With 7/7, we thought there was going to be another bomb — that was conflicting with identifying the victims. Families are going through such distress, and it's understandable why. I think we're better now, but obviously there are still going to be delays.”
