Sunday People

ANGEL OF WOOLWICH STILL TRAUMATISE­D 5YRS I cradled Lee Rigby as he lay dying & took on his killers... now I want to meet his brave mum

- By Antonia Paget

NEARLY five years have passed since Ingrid Loyaukenne­tt courageous­ly confronted Fusilier Lee Rigby’s killers – the knives in their hands still smeared with the soldier’s blood.

Five long years since the woman who became known as an Angel of Woolwich tended to his butchered body in the street as others filmed the atrocity aftermath on their phones or walked on by.

Only now is brave mum Ingrid finally ready to move on and put the terrifying attack on May 22, 2013, behind her. But first, she says she needs the help of one person – Lee’s mum Lyn.

To help Ingrid keep his memory alive, and to deal with the fact she could not save him.

“I would have loved to know him,” says Ingrid, 53. “I’d like to talk to his mother and find out what kind of a man he was. What was he like as a child? Did he like painting or music? I know it will be hard for Lyn as losing a child is devastatin­g, but I’d like to sit down with her so I can understand what he was like.

Anxiety

“In my mind, as long as you talk about a person, they never die.” Although she hopes Lyn, 51, has found peace since her son’s death, Ingrid admits she has struggled to move on herself. The attack on 25-year-old Fusilier Lee in May 2013 has haunted the former teacher. She has anxiety and is on benefits as she struggles to find work. But today, standing strong with children Pawony and Basil Baradaran-mozaffari, who have helped her through dark times, she yearns to move on. “I would like to put it behind me,” she says. “At his memorial I want to pay my respects, lay flowers and say a prayer for Lee. Maybe afterwards I can sit down with Lyn and draw a line under it.” Ingrid’s life changed forever as Lee, of the 2nd Battalion Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, was walking to the Royal Artillery Barracks in South East London when Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale knocked him down in a car. The pair had been hunting for a soldier to kill. Seeing Lee in a Help For Heroes T-shirt, they attacked him with a meat cleaver and machete. They told onlookers their sickening act was revenge for the killing of Muslims by the British military abroad. Ingrid was passing on a 53 bus after leaving her son’s 23rd birthday celebratio­ns. She jumped out to give first aid.

Along with Gemini Donnellyma­rtin and her mum Amanda, she was dubbed one of the Angels of Woolwich after the women tended to the soldier’s body.

Then Ingrid stunned onlookers by bravely facing up to the killers, who were also carrying a gun, to ask them ‘why’.

When Adebolajo, then 28, said they wanted to “start a war” on the streets, Ingrid’s reply was a foretaste of the nation’s response to terror attacks in London and Manchester in the last five years.

She said: “It is only you versus many. You are going to lose.”

Five years on she tells us everything from that day is “like a film in my head”. She says: “I could see from his clothes he was a young person so it made me think of my own son. They were a similar age.

“When I’m in Woolwich or I see pictures, I recall the conversati­on I had with the murderer and the feeling of being watched.”

Ingrid, a dual British and French national who has lived here for more than 30 years. is also troubled by the memory of dozens of people standing about during the attack.

“I noticed people stopping, just on the side of where his body was, watching him bleeding,” she says.

Backlash

“Even mothers stopping with children from kindergart­en. People were filming on phones. I couldn’t understand why the police did not come for so long.”

When they did arrive she watched as they felled the killers with shots to their legs. Then she carried on

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