Birmingham soldier's escape from bomb blast in Basra

Mar 22 2009 by Paul Bradley, Sunday Mercury

A TEENAGE Midland soldier defied death when he stepped on a roadside bomb – and walked away without a scratch on his body.

Trooper Tobias Dingwall had just turned 18 when he was deployed to war-torn Iraq for the first time.

Just a few weeks into the operational tour, he was left thanking his lucky stars when he walked over an improvised terrorist device hidden in the road.

The blast from the bomb, which was packed with a lethal cocktail of explosives designed to burn through the army’s toughest body armour, should have killed him instantly.

The shockwaves alone should have been enough to knock him out, collapse his lungs, stop his heart and kill him stone dead.

But it didn’t.

Experts said later that he was lucky not to have been vaporised.

And if a secondary device had been planted nearby the rest of his patrol could have been wiped out.

Worse still, if a string of consecutive bombs – called a “daisy chain” – had been planted, the effects could have been catastrophic.

But lucky Tobias escaped not only with his life, but with every bone and limb intact.

Trooper Dingwall, from Perry Barr, Birmingham, revealed: “We had been doing a routine patrol near the Shatt Al Arab Hotel in Basra.

“I was at the back of the 12-man troop as we walked through a narrow alley.

“We had done it loads of times before so we were pretty confident that everything would be OK.

“Then there was this sudden deafening boom. I turned round to see the alleyway just behind me exploding into the air.

“A car was nearby and just managed to avoid the blast, too, or there would have been shrapnel flying everywhere.

“I just froze and stared. I was in a state of utter shock.