T I sprayed the knifeman hoping to short-circuit that suicide vest...
HE image is one no passerby will ever forget. A knife-wielding terrorist in a suicide belt being confronted on London Bridge by a man with a fire extinguisher.
Desperately trying to keep Usman Khan from blowing up the belt he believed was live, John Crilly used the force of the foam to blind the terrorist and push him back, potentially saving many lives.
He became instantly known as one of the London Bridge heroes, the brave men who tackled Khan until police arrived.
John, a reformed ex-prisoner, had been fighting Khan inside the corridor of Fishmongers’ Hall when he snatched the extinguisher from the wall.
Speaking about the events of that day for the first time, John 48, said: “At first, I thought throw that at him, then I thought I could spray it and soak the belt, maybe short-circuit the belt.
“I started spraying him and it seemed to do the job. I was spraying it in his eyes. He was all covered in foam and then he came bursting through it again with the knives. He’d gone for the door and I followed him out. He started heading to the bridge and I remember just seeing all these people and screaming at them to move.”
He and a man wielding the tusk of a narwhal both chased after Khan.
Reliving the events of Friday, November 29, John said: “I keep spraying him. He can’t see and that gives the whale guy a chance to give him a poke.”
At this point, John and others jumped on a man they believed was wearing a live suicide belt.
“Another guy caught him off balance and took him down and then we all just jumped on him,” John said. Khan fell on his back. John added: “I’ve got his right hand and I’m trying to get the blades off him. Then the police were there, telling us to back off him. They immediately tasered him. They took their time to shoot, it wasn’t all gung-ho.
“They kept telling him to stop moving. I was shouting, ‘Just shoot him’. They shot him twice and he was still moving. He had the belt on. They shot him again.”
John was freed on licence in 2018 after the law on joint enterprise was changed.
A former heroin addict, he was part of a Manchester burglary that went fatally wrong when his co-defendant killed Augustine Maduemezia, 71, with a single punch. For this, he says he is profoundly sorry.
He said: “My life has been spent wishing that day never happened.”
Central to turning his life around has been his close friendship with Jack Merritt, 25, the inspirational young man from Learning Together who died that day. John was studying for a law degree while serving time, and had mentore Jack as a law student visiting the jail. Jack had come to John’s graduation, and greeted him when he became the first prisoner released after the law changed on joint enterprise.
John said: “If I’d met Jack much earlier in my life maybe things would have been different.”
He started using heroin when his mum died suddenly when he was 18.
John added: “I think I wanted to kill myself, but it numbed the pain instead.”
He is now clean and volunteers with Learning Together as he continues to rebuild his life.
But he knows the events of London Bridge will stay with him for a long time.
John had been chatting to his friend, ex-prisoner Gareth Evans, in the hallway outside the Learning Together conference taking place inside the hall, at about 2pm when he heard shouting. Minutes later, he saw Saskia Jones, 23, who became the second person killed in the attack.
He said: “At first, I thought it was just a couple of the girls messing about. Then it got a bit louder. I went down to have a look and as we rounded the bottom of the stairs, Saskia and a colleague were lying there bleeding.
“At the bottom of the stairs stood Usman Khan with his two knives out jumping about like a mad man. It didn’t take too long to realise what was going on. Without stereotyping, he had a big beard, two knives, shouting, ‘Allahu akbar’. He was wearing a suicide belt.”
Both men knew Saskia and her colleague – who survived the attack –
Saskia’s lying there bleeding... I hit him with a chair and he went flying
JOHN RECALLING DESPERATE STRUGGLE TO SAVE SASKIA JONES
well. “Gareth immediately started trying to help the girls, to stop the bleeding,” John said. “Another woman was walking towards Usman in a trance. I was just shouting at him, ‘What are you doing?’
“He said, ‘I’m going to kill you all’. I was screaming at the lady to get away and she kept walking towards him, so I had to get hold of her and pull her back up the stairs. That’s when he first lunged towards me with the knife.“
“There was a lectern at the bottom of the stairs, so I picked that up and ran at him. It snapped in half like a big stick, so I went for him again with it.”
As the two men were fighting, another man appeared with a narwhal tusk torn off the wall. John said: “I just thought, ‘where the f*** have you got that from?’,
The men took turns fending off the 28-year-old terrorist.
John said: “Usman realises he’s not getting past us, so I’ve seen him go back towards the girl. (The woman who survived) is already in a pool of blood, so I followed him to try and stop him, but just before I got there, he stuck the knife in her twice again.
“I hit him with a chair and he’s lost his balance and gone flying over the other side of the room. He was swinging the knives all over the place and obviously he’s got the belt.”
John and the man with the narwhal tusk managed to drive Usman away from the injured women and into the corridor. From there the fight went out on to the bridge.
He said: “Saskia was still alive when we went out of the front door. Gareth was screaming at her to stay awake. I didn’t know anything about Jack. I hadn’t seen him at all.
“I know it sounds like everyone says the sun shone out of Jack’s arse but it really did, he was just special. He never looked down on anyone, he always tried to see the best in everyone.”
In the hours following the attack, John watched Prime
Minister Boris Johnson make political capital of his friends’ deaths. He said: “It’s what they do. They’re rubbing their hands when something like that happens. They just do it to get votes. Instead of recognising Jack’s beliefs, they did the opposite.
“Jack gave up his life. They can’t give up 10 minutes to have a think about it.”
When we speak, John, now living in Cambridge, is with Jan Cunliffe from Joint Enterprise – Not Guilty by Association, the campaign group that helped free him by bringing about a change in the law in 2016. John was going to visit his two grown up sons in Manchester after the conference and had a bag with many of his belongings with him.
Jan said: “John lost a friend and mentor in the attack, but he also lost his clothes and his phone, which were taken as evidence. He needs support.”
To campaigners like JENGbA, what happened on London Bridge is not the story of failed rehabilitation but of how ex-prisoners’ lives can be transformed by people like Jack and Saskia.
John can never make up for the life lost in 2005 when he committed a burglary. But, 14 years later, he has saved an unknown number of lives. And he knows Jack would have been proud of him.