Woman heard ‘screaming really loud’

Shocked residents have described hearing a woman’s screams as she was shot by police in north London in an anti-terror raid.

Armed officers, with masks covering their faces, surrounded a terraced property on Harlesden Road, Willesden, on Thursday.

Ruth Haile, who lives in the road, said she heard shots and saw a Muslim woman on the ground being treated by five or six nurses. “She shouted ‘Don’t touch me, my body, don’t touch my dress’,” she added.

Alexandra Sabanov heard screaming shortly after officers with gas masks and snipers “swarmed” the house next door to hers. “We heard ‘bang, bang, bang, bang’ and just saw a number of armed police there with their guns pointing at our next door neighbour’s window,” the mother-of-one said. “They were in the garden, they were everywhere. They swarmed the whole house practically.”

She heard a woman “screaming really loud” and described her neighbours as a “standard Muslim couple” of whom she “never suspected anything at all”.

Neighbour Alex Paton, 50, said: “There was coppers and masked men with guns and there was a guy running down the road with a gas mask and a machine gun.”