'Blair talks about regret, but he should apologise to me and to all who suffered'

Pam Warren made little attempt to control her anger last night. Three years after surviving the crash that has left her permanently disfigured, she can hardly believe she is the target of a smear campaign by the Government.

But perhaps there is no surprise that the Department of Transport was desperately seeking "dirt" about Mrs Warren, 35. She is the type of person who will always be the bane of officialdom, and has, indeed, been a critic who would not go away.

Mrs Warren is the highest-profile victim of the Paddington rail crash in 1999. Pictures of her, behind a plastic mask to protect scar tissue on her face, were a harrowing reminder of just how terrible the experience of the passengers caught up in the accident was.

She had to go through the rounds of media interviews about her experience. But then, instead of fading away, she became an increasingly public and, at times, controversial figure. Mrs Warren, a financial consultant before the accident, was the survivor who disclosed that Stephen Byers had told her and three other Paddington casualties of his intention to place Railtrack into administration in September last year – and not in October, as he later told MPs.

The hapless Mr Byers, who was Transport Secretary at the time, denied this. But it was to be one of the final nails in his ministerial coffin, and will be one of the key issues in possible future litigation by Railtrack shareholders.

Yesterday, after learning about the "dirty tricks" mounted against her, and the "apologies" that followed from Tony Blair and his ministers past and present, Mrs Warren said: "Tony Blair's apology was not really an apology at all, and, in fact, was quite insulting. He talks about regret, but he should apologise personally, not just to me, but others who suffered as well.

"Is it also not strange that he did not know what was going on in his Government?"

She added: "What happened to me [in the rail crash] was that I was in effect battered with a baseball bat and then burnt. Three years later, as I am trying to achieve some sort of a recovery, I find that they are fishing around for dirt about me. Am I not right to feel aggrieved? I want to see the memo which was sent, because I have a legal right to know, and I have no problems with others seeing it. I am not going to take any legal action, because there isn't much point.

"What I do find very sinister is how spiteful they are being, and memos are being sent to Labour Party HQ. And they are using civil servants to do this. Isn't that worrying? What does it say about this Government, which is supposedly running this country?

"Why don't they spend more time on sorting out their policies instead of spin? Then maybe things like Paddington would not happen. Or perhaps I am being 'political' saying that."

Life for Mrs Warren is difficult enough without additional problems. Both she and her husband, Peter, 55, are adjusting to their new lives.

After the accident Mrs Warren was told she had only a 50 per cent chance of survival. Her fingertips had to be amputated. She had to put bleaching cream on her face to compensate for the darkness of some of the skin grafts. She had to keep her mask on for 18 months to protect her burnt face. At one stage, in despair, she attempted to take her own life.

"My life? It is a constant round of surgery and therapy. My career is finished, and I am in pain. I get tired too easily," she said last night.

"I have no feelings in my fingers and sometimes I only remember their existence when I leave a trail of blood with them. But I am not, of course, the only one who suffered in the crash. There are plenty of others. Perhaps if those officials running around trying to find 'dirt' on us suffered just a fraction of what we did, they would realise just how pathetic they are being."

Mrs Warren has not always seen eye-to-eye with those bereaved by the Paddington crash, particularly in her opposition to the pursuit of corporate manslaughter charges against Railtrack. Her attitude was formed by a meeting with Gerald Corbett last year, the chief executive of Railtrack at the time. "We asked him some very strong questions," Mrs Warren said afterwards.

"He changed at the meeting. He arrived as the chief executive of Railtrack and he left as Gerald Corbett, clearly very upset. He said 'sorry' and seemed to mean it. It was quite emotional." Afterwards it was falsely claimed that she had accepted a salaried post with Railtrack. Mrs Warren blamed another group of Paddington victims for spreading the story.

Last night she said: "The bereaved families are after corporate manslaughter. We, who survived, don't want to go down that path. We want to look to the future to prevent such things happening again rather than look back to the past. We simply have different views, that's all. There is no point in having friction over this."

Mrs Warren was in the London-bound Great Western express on 5 October 1999 that was hit almost head-on by a Thames Trains commuter service that passed a red light, killing 31 people.