THE cabbie who locked the Liverpool 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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       Taxi driver David Perry heroically locked the bomber in his car after the explosion Credit: Rex 2

       Security guard Darren Knowles raced to help cabbie David Perry after the bomb went off

       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 Mirror: "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.

       "My first priority was stopping the taxi driver going back to the car, because he had his phone and other things in it and he wanted to get them out.

       "I took him to the nearest nurse to get medical attention.

       "I did not think about myself I was thinking of getting the taxi driver to safety before anything else went up.

       "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 Liverpool Echo: "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 The Times, 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.

       Taxi blown up in Liverpool attack removed from scene