I’m coming back on the beat says hero PC a year on from terror that nearly killed him
He admitted that his family are concerned about his return to work but said: “It’s a job I enjoy. It’s who I am, to be honest.”
Last year, PC Marques revealed he thought he was going to die when he was attacked by the terrorists, who had just driven their van into pedestrians.
He confronted them outside London Bridge station as they launched their knife attack while wearing what later turned out to be fake suicide vests.
PC Marques thanked the public for keeping his morale up with their supportive messages.
He said: “You go through these stages where you’re stuck in a bed and you’ve got time to keep thinking about things.
“Then you get these messages from people. Genuine, heartfelt, caring messages.
“You’ve never met them and you never will, in most cases, but it makes a difference. It was inspiring, it was overwhelming.”
He was two years into his BTP career when the terrorists struck.
He said: “The three of them were standing together like a little wolf pack – and they’re staring at me.
“The short one on the righthand side was saying ‘Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar’. He said it a few times, eyes bulging.
“I’m basically just like a cowboy waiting for the draw.”
He charged at the first attacker, Wayne Marques, above, recalls the London Bridge attack when Redouane, left, Zaghba, top right, and Butt killed eight people swinging at him with his baton, hitting him “with everything I had as hard as I could, straight through his head, trying to go for a knockout blow”.
He heard the terrorist “yelp in pain” – only to strike back.
“He’d hit me so hard that my right eye went lights out straight away, I just went blind,” he said.
PC Marques, who has regained his sight, said: “I was fighting left to right as I had one eye so I’m moving left to right, left to right.”
He recalled being stabbed in the leg, saying, “I’m thinking, ‘***t, there’s a knife in my leg’, while I’m fighting the second one and the third one”. He was then stabbed in the hand and could remember little apart from “swinging my baton all over the place”.
He said: “I didn’t realise how badly I was hurt.
“The adrenaline, the fighting, all of that, I could feel what they were doing to me but I couldn’t feel it at the same time. I could just feel that I’d been cut and hurt.”
He believed that the fight lasted 90 seconds before the terrorists ran on to Borough Market, which was packed with tourists, where they claimed more victims.