Susanna’s terror: ‘It happened on my doorstep’
When terror hit Streatham, it was too close to home for one TV host…
Terrible news broke the calm of Sunday 2 February. Jihadi Sudesh Amman, 20, ran amok in South London, knifing two innocent passers-by, before being shot dead by police.
The chilling incident happened in Streatham, a residential suburb of London that is home to Good Morning Britain’s Susanna Reid.
Amman had been living in the city in a bail hostel, after being released just days earlier from serving a prison sentence for terrorism offences.
‘So this happened, I have to say, right on my doorstep,’ Susanna told viewers as she sat alongside co-host Piers Morgan the following day, as shocking footage of the scene was broadcast.
‘I saw the police helicopter up in the air and then we realised something was happening. I went on to social media and, of course, discovered this was happening just a couple of minutes’ drive away from where I live.’
Susanna, 49, told viewers she then rushed to the scene and showed viewers photographs she had of the Odeon cinema. ‘That’s where we go to watch films and it happened literally just diagonally opposite,’ she said
‘People were shocked, stunned, frightened.
‘There were local residents who couldn’t get back into their homes, who didn’t know what was going on, if the threat was still going on.’
Like many local residents, Susanna was shocked that such a brutal attack could strike at the heart of her community.
And it is not the first time crime has touched the mumof-three’s life. Last year, she revealed how she was once mugged near her London home, an ordeal that left her physically unharmed, but very shaken.
She was taking money out of a cashpoint, when a man pulled a knife on her. She gave chase and, in the ensuing struggle, he slashed her raincoat with a knife. ‘For months afterwards, I feared anyone walking close to me on the street,’ she admitted.
Of course, terrorist violence is not the only rising crime in London. As a mother of three teenage boys, Susanna has been profoundly affected by the rising level of knife crime.
When Mayor Sadiq Khan was a guest on GMB, she railed at him, saying it wasn’t enough to say: ‘It breaks my heart every single time we hear about a stabbing in the city as it would anyone else in the country.’
‘ Why are we not doing enough? Why are you not doing enough to save our teenagers?’
‘For months I feared anyone walking close to me on the street’