Manchester bomb

Manchester bomb: the baby

Bomb: the iconic photo from 1996

It became one of the iconic images of the Manchester bomb: The Manchester Evening News photograph of a mother in anguish running after a security guard who is taking her baby to get help.

Lisa Hughes and her husband Perry were on John Dalton Street shopping with their daughter Heidi and 7-month old baby Sam when the bomb went off. Glass rained down on them, they were surrounded by panic and chaos and her baby was covered in blood. It was every mother's worst nightmare.

Lisa and Perry feared for their baby's life, but it turned out that most of the blood splattered over his tiny body came from their own cuts they received shielding Sam from the glass. Between them, they required more than 50 stitches.

Lisa Hughes on the injuries to her son Sam > Audio and Video links on this page require Realplayer

A cut to Sam's wrist narrowly missed an artery and he now has three scars on his hand. Thankfully, ten years on, Sam is a normal, happy boy. This is their story:

Lisa Hughes, mother

"When the bomb went off, the sound was incredible. It was the loudest noise I've ever heard. There was few seconds delay before the sound of breaking glass surrounded us and the window on John Dalton Street collapsed on Perry and I and the pram. Sam was only 7 months old he was in his pushchair. It was a beautiful hot summer's day and the next minute, I had a screaming child covered in blood. It was sheer panic. I just feared the worst - there was so much blood. He was screaming so loudly - he'd never cried in that way before. It was a horrific noise for me as a mother to listen to.

"Suddenly, a security guard appeared from nowhere. He actually picked Sam up and started to run down John Dalton Street towards Deansgate where all the police were gathered. I actually ran after him saying: 'give me my baby' - I knew he was trying to take Sam to safety but at that time I just wanted to hold him and take care of him myself. As I ran down the street, my initial feelings were fear that something desperate had happened to Sam. At that point, I didn't know how severe the injuries were, and I thought that he could bleed to death."

Perry Hughes, father

Ten years on: the Hughes family

"Automatically, you go into this mode of protecting your children. I pushed my daughter Heidi into the road with her friend and they fell between two parked cars and managed to get myself with Lisa over the pram in that split second between the boom and the implosion when all the glass came down. I don't think you really think - everything up to arriving at the hospital was on automatic pilot. Some people were sat in doorways and crying, the one thing you did see was everyone trying to help each other. After the noise, we looked down at Sam and saw he was covered in blood. Heidi started to scream: she thought she was losing her legs because they were covered in blood. So I went to pick her up. The next second, I look round and the security officer has taken Sam off Lisa and I can hear Lisa screaming: 'Give me back my baby."

"We didn't even realise any photographs had been taken but when we've looked in the press, there are quite a number of photographs actually hanging over the pram which was the second the bomb went off. You see yourself in the newspapers and you realise what's just taken place: the biggest mainland bomb since World War II in Europe. And you think: Oh my God, we were part of that, how lucky were we? Some people have said how unlucky were we to be in Manchester. Well, we don't look at it that way."

Sam Hughes, aged ten

"I think I was lucky because I could have died that day and I thank God I didn't. When I look at the famous photograph I feel sad in lots of ways. I'm not really sure why I'm sad, because I can't remember anything but when I look at myself I feel as though it's somebody else and I feel sorry for that person. Sometimes, my mum's a bit over-protective but most of the time, she's all right!"