Witness Statement of: Khalid AhmedNo. of statement: 1Exhibits:Date of statement:

GRENFELL TOWER PUBLIC INQUIRY

WITNESS STATEMENT OF KHALID AHMED

I, KHALID SULEMAN AHMED, will say as follows:-

Background

1. This statement is about the events that took place on 14 June 2017. I lived in flat 51

of Grenfell Tower.

2. My date of birth is 1996.

3. I had been staying with my Aunt Amina Mohamed since 2014 in her flat in Grenfell

Tower. Now I study at University, but then I was at college.

The Night of the Fire

4. It's difficult to remember what I had been doing on the day of the fire. I know that I

went to college during the day and then came home at about 7pm. I broke my fast as

it was Ramadan and waited for my aunt to go to bed before starting to play

PlayStation. My friends had gone to a cinema in Acton and I had been thinking of

going with them but I didn't. It was Ramadan and so I decided to just stay at home.

5. My Aunt went to bed quite early, at around Ilpm, and she was asleep. Usually I had

iPhone headphones in when playing Playstation that were very loud, but at one stage I

stood up to go to the toilet and pulled a headphone out and it stopped working. I

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started using my Aunt's headphones and they were not so loud. It was around lam,

though I'm not sure as I wasn't looking at the clock.

6. I realised I could smell something which told me that it might have been burning in

the kitchen. I was playing Fifa and I remember that I was really frustrated to leave the

game as I was winning, but I wanted to make sure that I had not left anything on in

the kitchen. As soon as I stood up to find out more, I saw lights out of the window.

When [looked out I could just see the cladding on the side of the building burning.

7. I looked out of the window and down the sidie of the tower. There was a ledge in the

cladding outside the window hut! could still see down the side of the tower and could

see that the corner of the building was on fire. I could see sparks from the fire and

some smoke. It was much lower down than our flat, perhaps on the third, forth or

fifth floor, but I could see that something was going on.

8. I stood there for a second and thought about the situation. Normally I would not be

concerned about a fire in the tower, and I was not too worried this time but I had a

feeling that something was different this time because the fire came out of the window

and the side of the building was on fire. Because of this I though that there was a

chance it could be a serious fire and so I went to wake my Aunt and ask her what to

do. When she woke up I told her that I thought there was a fire downstairs. She came

straight to the living room window and saw what was going on and said that we

should get our stuff and leave. It must have been 3 minutes between me first seeing

the fire and and her saying we should leave.

9. My Aunt went to get her phone and her clothes, and then got ready to leave. I wasn't

wearing many clothes at that stage. I had shorts on and just put tracksuit bottoms on.

10. There was no smoke in the flat. I put on my shoes, we were in the hallway and I put

on my shoe against the wall. I remember that my Aunt told me off. It was something

that I did which left a mark quite regularly and she didn't like it. I mention this

because it shows me that we were not panicking at all at that time. We thought it

would just be an, easily containable fire and that we were not in danger. The only

thing that was on my mind was that the tire was coming out of the window as I sadi

before and that this was strange. When we left we shut the door. We thought that we

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would be returning to the flat later that night. We closed everything as normal and

left.

1 1. I went out into the corridor, and stood there for second. I realised it was very quiet

and very late and that everyone would be asleep. 1 looked at the lifts and saw that

they were out of service. I thought about the fact that the fire was only on our side of

the building. I could see this when I looked out of the window earlier. I decided that

I should just see if our neighbours were there and if so tell them about the fire because

I thought they wouldn't know about it otherwise, so I started knocking on people's

doors. banged on Willie's door first, he lived in flat 52. Willie's wife answered the

door, and asked what was wrong. I told her there was a fire and that I thought it

would be a good idea to leave the building. She said she would go in and wake up

everyone else in the house. Eamon, who lived in flat 53 didn't open the door. Then I

knocked on flat 54 and they were completely unaware of the fire. My Aunt came out

into the communal area and saw what I was doing and at first said not to knock. She

didn't want to cause any trouble.

12. Flat 56 was the flat that made us realise that that there was something serious going

on. I was knocking on flat 55 while the people in the other flats were getting ready to

leave, but they didn't answer. Then the door to flat 56 opened and our neighbour

came out coughing with his hand on his mouth. There was so much smoke coming

from their flat that within 30 seconds the whole of the communal area had gone black.

Everyone was coughing. There was no way you could handle it. It was very strong.

As soon as the smoke came up your nose you couldn't breathe.

13. It's very hard to describe the colour of the smoke. It was very dark and was greyish.

It was still possible to see the person in front of you but the coughing it casued made

it impossible to breath.

14. I just turned to my aunt, who said that she wanted to leave so we went to the stairs.

My aunt went first. Behind her there was an old lady and her daughter with a child, I

followed them. The child was young and she was frightened and was shaking and

having difficulty walking. I let her go ahead, but she was frantic. At one stage my

Aunt couldn't see me and thought that I was going back up. She said, "Come down.

Come now!" But I was walking with the old lady.

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15. As I let the old lady pass me, I saw a fireman who was going up the stairs. I saw two

or three others after that. They weren't panicked. They were just getting on with the

job. As soon as I saw them I was happy as I thought they would put the fire out. I

can't remember what they were carrying.

16. There were other people in front of us walking down the stairs. You could feel that

there was urgency in the way people were walking, but there was no panic. No one

was screaming or anything like that. There was no smoke in the stairwells; it was just

normal Grenfell Tower.

17. I did not hear a fire alarm at all while leaving the building. As we were going down

the stairs I think I may have seen between five or ten people, perhaps more, but not

many. At no stage did I see any smoke on the way down.

18. When we got to the bottom we left through the normal front door that we usually used

to exit. It was an automatic door but I think there was someone there who was

holding the door open. There was no button to press and to leave the tower you

needed too have a key fob. I think that because of this some people found it difficult

to leave through the front like us, and so left through a side door. This was a problem

because the side door led to the place where the burning cladding was falling.

19. By the time we got out of the Tower I think there were 20 to 25 people standing

outside watching. Mnay people people came very quickly though and within 20

minutes it had changed totally, it was like half of Kensington and Chelsea were

standing there.

20. I looked up at the building after leaving. I couldn't see any fire on the side of the

building that had the main entrance that we had left from, the south side. As we

walked round and turned the corner though I could see that there were things falling

down from the building on the other side, the east facing side which faced the leisure

centre. At that stage the fire still hadn't reached our floor. It had climbed a couple of

floors from where it had been when I had first seen it, but hadn't reached ours.

21. For the first 10 minutes we were outside, there were no police. People were getting as

close as they wanted to the building. There were people getting really close, standing

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under trees. We stood just near the leisure centre, up by the hill. The crowd swelled

quickly and we were watching the fire.

22. The fire spread very quickly as we watched from the hill. Within minutes it had

climbed all the way up one side of the building. After 30 minutes, the police started

to arrive and told people to step back.

23. We watched the fire hit our living room. I didn't feel angry at that moment but I just

couldn't understand how it had happened. I could see people standing at windows in

other parts of the building and I was really worried about them. We didn't know at the

time but the fire didn't actually spread through the whole of our house. We thought it

would but it didn't. We saw the fire spread up the top of the building though and then

start to move across and to the side.

24. I remember after we had left there was a kid by us who just started crying. I asked

why and he said that he grandfather was in the Tower. That was the moment I

realised that the whole building contained so many different people. Families,

children and even pets. Everyone's lives. We could see people flashing their phones

from up in the building, wanting help.

25. The police just got on with things. There were three or four of them standing in a line

trying to hold people back but they weren't able to stop people getting through at first.

As more police arrived though they managed to push people back.

26. We stayed there for the whole night. People started calling me to check I was okay

and contacting me on Twitter. Some of my friends came to see what was happening.

They had been at the Park Royal cinema which is a ten or fifteen minute drive away.

27. After we had been there for about three hours I went to get a drink at the local NISA.

My Aunt then went to her family friend's house but I

went back to the Tower because I just wanted to see what was going on and whether

people were okay. While I was there I went on Twitter and began to realise from the

posts that people were leaving that some people were trapped inside the building and

that it was likely some people would lose their lives. I stayed all night by the tower.

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28. Eventually morning came and the whole place was a media storm. There were press

everywhere.

29. The following night I stayed at my uncle's house. I didn't want to come back to the

area, but my Aunt said to come. I used to play football at Westway sports centre.

The pitch that I used to play on had ashes from the building that I had lived in. I just

couldn't understand how it could be as it was. It was like a film or something. There

were people everywhere handing out things.

30. For the first couple of months after the fire I slept for only three or four hours a night.

I had never had a problem with sleeping before but the experience of the fire made me

hyper vigillent and anxious at night. I would also think all the time about how to

avoid being trapped in buildings.

31. When we were in the hotel once before we had moved to our new home, a fire alarm

went off. I freaked out. I went to the door and there was something in me that said

this is was Grenfell 2.0. There was a lady on my floor in the hotel who just started

screaming. It was a problem because even though there were loads of people from

Grenfell Tower they just kept on doing fire alarm tests in the hotel. I don't think they

realised at first what it was like for people, but this just shows how deeply everyone

was affected by things. The first time they did it, they didn't notify anyone.

Afterwards they realised and they started slipping in notes under doors just to say that

they were going to carry out tests. But the first week they just did it, and it was chaos.

32. There was a young guy that I knew who died in the fire. His name was Yassin. I

didn't know him personally but I always saw him around the block. I was told that he

was outside but ran back in to try and save his family and died inside the building.

Also there was a young family. An Ethiopian family and Hashem. I was in the lift

with him only a few days before the fire. And then the next time I saw him he was all

over the media because he had died.

33. I have thought so many times about what might have happened had things been

different and if I was not awake or had I found out about the fire 20 minutes.

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Statement of truth

I believe that the facts stated in this statement are true.

I am willing for this statement to form part of the evidence before the Inquiry and to be published on

the Inquiry's website.

Signed: 5*-t

Dated: rt 1-(0 Z...0kC.

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