London’s heart hit in attack
Driver’s onslaught leaves five dead, 40 injured and a city traumatised
WEDNESDAY afternoon in London: the usual dissection of Prime Minister’s Questions and then bang. The sound of panic rising from the streets below and, seconds later, gunshots in quick succession: three or four in total.
Two bodies lay on Parliament’s front lawn, one a police officer, the other the man who killed him.
It was 2.40pm. Two more people had been killed by a car speeding down Westminster Bridge and mounting the pavement. At least 40 more had injuries, many “catastrophic”. One of those victims later died.
The car had crashed into the railings of the palace. The driver then ran to the palace gates, where he stabbed a police officer several times before being shot about 30m inside the perimeter of the palace.
Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood, who lost his brother in the 2002 Bali bombings, performed CPR on the fallen officer. Forty minutes later the officer would be covered over with a plastic sheet.
The target was no accident: the bricks and mortar of the heart of British democracy. But the victims wandering over Westminster Bridge could have been anyone.
“We were just walking up to the station and there was a loud bang and a guy, someone, crashed a car and took some pedestrians out,” witness Rick Longley said.
“They were just laying there and then the whole crowd just surged around the corner by the gates just opposite Big Ben.
“A guy came past my right shoulder with a big knife and just started plunging it into the policeman. I have never seen anything like that. I just can’t believe what I just saw.”
❝past
A guy came
my right shoulder with a big knife and just started plunging it into the policeman.
The press offices at Westminster run all along the top floor of the palace, from Big Ben then around to Westminster Hall, directly overlooking what was clearly an incident of immense seriousness.
Journalists had rushed to the windows, predictably pulling down the antibomb-blast curtains for a better look.
A large black car was smashed against the high black railings opposite Westminster tube station. From office windows over Westminster Bridge, people had watched it mount the pavement and leave a trail of casualties in its wake, before twisting through 90 degrees and crashing into the
barriers of the parliamentary estate. Its driver had escaped, running past tourists on the packed pavement, a knife in his hand, and around to the front gate where police officers wait to let ministers and their ministerial cars in and out.
A second witness, Tawhid Tanim, said he heard three shots – “bang, bang, bang” – some 10 or 15m from the coffee bar where he was waiting for friends.
Mr Tanim said: “It was so loud. People were running like crazy, I couldn’t see it properly. I started running.”
Police officers told the crowds to “just keep running”, he said.
In the courtyard behind the cloisters, Prime Minister Theresa May was bundled into her silver jaguar and driven to Number 10 Downing Street.
Inside the Palace of Westminster, staff watched out of windows as attempts were made to revive the two men, one quite evidently a killer.
Hundreds of MPs were held in the commons chamber all afternoon and news of the possibility of mass casualties on the bridge swept through the palace like a wave.
Below the stairs at Westminster Hall, visitors and tourists, and constituents who had arrived for meetings with their MPs, were kept in offices unable to leave. In the grand hall, hundreds of people were held – all potential witnesses.
At 7pm, parliamentary authorities confirmed the House of Commons and the House of Lords would sit the next morning at “the usual time”.
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