A man convicted of a brutal gang rape in the 80s is due to give evidence at the July 7 bombings inquest this week.

Garri Holness, formerly Gary Linton, turned into a victims’ rights campaigner after the 7/7 bombings in an attempt to get more compensation for the families of those killed as well as those injured.

After the bombings, in which Holness lost a leg, he became the representative for victims’ rights.

Last year Holness was pictured shaking hands with soon to be Prime Minister David Cameron at a memorial event for the victims of the bombings.

However, it was soon discovered Holness had been part of a gang of youths, known as the Young Raiders, which had brutally raped two 16-year-old girls in Brixton in 1985.

Surrounded by the gang, the two girls were robbed of their jewellery and money, dragged into an alleyway and bundled into separate underground garages on the Stockwell Park estate.

That was the beginning of a two-hour ordeal, during which the girls were stripped naked and between them raped 45 times at knifepoint.

Holness was jailed for seven years for his part in the rape, but later claimed his conviction was overturned and that he was released from jail early as a result – which was untrue.

He was on the Tube between Russell Square and Kings Cross when at 8.50am Germaine Maurice Lindsay, also known as Abdullah Jamal, detonated a rucksack bomb killing 26 people.

In January 2007 it emerged Holness had been awarded more than £100,000 in compensation for his injuries. He received £74,000 from the London Bombings Relief Charitable Fund and at least £33,000 from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme.

The amount he was awarded was more than 10 times that given to his two teenage victims.