A Royal Marine who cheated death when a grenade exploded in front of him says he can't wait to return to duty.

Commando Dominic Conway, 28, said he was lucky to be alive after being blasted with shrapnel when Iraqi soldiers threw a grenade into a house he was searching.

The explosion left him needing around 50 stitches as surgeons removed the shards of metal from his body.

The former Whitley Bay High School pupil said: "The grenade went off and fortunately the lads dived back out of the door but I was hit by the shrapnel - the lads then came back in and got the two Iraqis."

Cpl Conway and colleagues from 40 Commando were searching the houses in Abu Al Khasib, near Basra, when the grenade was thrown through a hole in the ceiling, landing just a metre from him.

He was yesterday back in the North-East recovering in the home he shares with his sister Abigail in Longbenton, North Tyneside.

He said the conditions he had witnessed the Iraqi people living in had convinced him it was right for the US and Britain to invade the country.

"The vast majority of people were really glad to see us and after they began to realise we weren't going to just leave them they were coming out of their houses and giving us information about who the special police were."

Cpl Conway, a veteran of the Afghanistan conflict, was operated on at a Kuwait hospital to remove shrapnel before being moved to Cyprus where he underwent another operation to remove a large chunk of metal from his lower back.

The first his family knew of the accident was when Cpl Conway called his father Martin to tell him not to worry.

Sister Abigail, 26, who found out about the incident last week, said: "He has been lucky, it could have been his face."

The blast happened days after Cpl Conway had uncovered evidence of Saddam Hussein's regime of torture after searching a police station near Basra.

Cpl Conway has been in the Marines for seven years and brother Luke, 24, is a lieutenant with the Royal Logistic Corps in Kuwait. The pair managed to meet up in hospital last weekend.

Their father Martin, 56, an engineer, of North Shields, North Tyneside, said: "I am extremely proud of both my sons."

Mum Jacquay, a financial accountant, of Whitley Bay, North Tyneside, said: "It could have been a lot worse. I worry for the people still out there."