Deborah Richardson

I was blown off my chair to the other side of the room, thrown against the wall and then every door and window caved in around me.

And my first reaction was that I had been shot because there was nothing else that had ever happened in the history of Victoria that

To even contemplate that it was a bomb, it just did not enter my head.

And I just thought the sheer force of me being thrown across a room had to have been a shotgun or something like that.

And so in those frantic seconds, I'm looking down at my body, trying to see where the blood is flowing.

because I can't think that it's anything else.

So I jumped up, you know, you've got adrenaline pumping through your body, I can't find the blood, I'm running out into the corridor and then all of a sudden my sergeant's there and he goes, are you all right?

And I said, I am.

And with that, there was another five explosions that happened from the time of the initial blast.

We found out later it was almost like a sound wave, concertina effect, where the car's blown up

And then because it's so forceful, other vehicles and things are also blowing up in this kind of sound wave effect.

Exactly.

And so that car was parked right out the front of the South Door.

What we found out later was that the crooks had tried to get the vehicle into a small car park between the main building of Russell Street and the second building, which housed our

D24 communications group.

And I had been told had they have got the car in there, both those buildings would have collapsed.

But we didn't always have a guard on duty.

We had a guard on duty that day and they said, no, you can't park there.

So they parked it out the front of the south door.

But I think the realisation was when I was standing in the corridor and all of a sudden we kind of looked at ourselves and gone, oh my God, it's a bomb.