Arrested man denies being infamous London jogger
LONDON— What appeared to be an open-and-shut case involving a jogger in London who pushed a woman in front of a bus is suddenly — and surprisingly — open again.
The police this week shared a video of the May 5 incident on Putney Bridge, which resulted in the woman’s tumbling into a traffic lane and nearly being hit by a bus, and they asked the public to help identify the man who pushed her.
On Thursday, the case appeared to have been cracked: A man was arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm.
But on Friday, a London law firm said that it was representing the man who had been arrested — a 41-yearold American private-equity executive who lives in London — and that he was innocent.
“Our client has been wrongly implicated in this matter; he categorically denies being the individual concerned and has irrefutable proof that he was in the United States at the time of the incident,” the law firm, Duncan Lewis Solicitors, said in a statement released on Twitter. “Consequently, we expect a swift resolution to this wholly untrue allegation.”
The law firm identified its client as Eric Bellquist, a partner at the private-equity firm Hutton Collins.
The Metropolitan Police Service, which did not name the man arrested, did not immediately respond to questions about its investigation or its reason for thinking that he had committed the crime.
The police originally had reported that the suspect under arrest in the attack was 41 years old, but later changed it to 50. On Friday, the age was changed back to 41. The police apologized for the mistake saying, “it was solely a matter of human error.”
Hutton Collins is a private-equity firm that focuses on middle-market companies, primarily in Britain. According to the firm’s website, Bellquist joined the firm in 2002, the year it was founded, after working in European leveraged finance at Lehman Brothers.
He represents Hutton Collins on the boards of two restaurant chains, Wagamama and Byron Hamburgers, and was behind the firm’s investment in Caffè Nero, a coffee shop chain.
Bellquist, who graduated in 1999 from the University of Colorado at Boulder, did not respond to messages sent by email, Facebook and LinkedIn, but his lawyer responded to queries with a copy of the statement released on Twitter.