Sajda Mughal: the woman who survived 7/7 – and began fighting extremism

After the tube she was commuting on was blown up, Mughal’s life changed for ever. A Muslim herself, she was horrified to hear Muslims been behind the attack. So she quit her job and started her own programme to take on extremism

Sajda Mughal was on her daily commute to her dream job in City recruitment on the morning her world was turned upside down. It was a July day in London, 16 years ago, one that throbbed with the summer heat, and Mughal was running late for work. She ducked into Turnpike Lane tube station in north London, as she usually did, and boarded the Piccadilly Line train. The one thing she did differently that morning was not getting into the first carriage of the train. “Every day until 6 July 2005, I would sit in that first carriage. Maybe it was a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or maybe I knew the first carriage was where I’d get a seat. But, on that particular day, I was late, so I rushed on to the platform and, instead of doing my usual thing, I just got on.”

This detail became all-important when, a few stops later, at King’s Cross, the 7/7 bomber Germaine Lindsay got on to Mughal’s train, boarding the first carriage, and blew himself up. “Twenty-six people died, most of whom were in the first carriage,” she says.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3ymw5qA