The 2017 London Bridge Attack – A Testimony

In the post-9/11 world, it is possible that everyone will experience terrorism at some point in their lives. Perhaps they will witness, or know someone who witnessed a terrorist attack, or if they are more fortunate they will simply read about the attacks in the news, with depressing regularity, and be asked by their employer to complete the Prevent training. Some years ago, I witnessed the aftermath of a terrorist attack. It is something I have only shared with a few friends and family. This is the first time I have put what happened that night into writing.

On June 3, 2017, my wife Di and I were in London walking back from the Theatre Royal Drury Lane after watching an excellent performance of 42nd Street. It was a knockout production and we were feeling invigorated, both from the glorious energy of the show and the fact that we were flying out to Barbados the next morning at 6 am to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. Then something strange happened. We were walking past a pub where a lone drinker was sitting in the beer garden scrolling through his phone. He told us to be careful going down the street where we were headed as ‘there’s been an attack’. He seemed perfectly sober, and we took heed of his warning although we had no choice but to continue on the path we were on as it led directly back to the hotel, and we were flying out in about six hours or so. It wasn’t long before we were walking towards a crowd of people in tears, covered in blood. They were heading in the opposite direction to us, and the further we travelled the more frantic their warnings became that we shouldn’t go forward as there had been mass stabbings and a vehicle-ramming attack with a van. It was obviously serious, but Di and I were now so close to our hotel that we felt we had no alternative but to keep going until we got there, even though we could be walking straight into a massacre. By the time we made it to the hotel entrance our blood was pumping as chaos reigned on the streets.

“Steve. The key, the key” Di screamed.

The hotel lobby had an electronic lock and I fumbled desperately in my wallet for the key card while thinking any second a madman with a knife was going to attack me. We made it inside safely. The atmosphere in the hotel bar was electric. The hotel took in people off the streets who couldn’t get home as the police had sealed off the roads. Guests of every race and religion were talking excitedly among themselves about what happened while BBC News 24 played out the facts onscreen.

The London Bridge attacks was one of five major terrorist attacks in the UK in 2017. Khuram Shazad Butt, Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba ploughed a van into pedestrians on London Bridge at around 10:00 pm, killing two people. The three perpetrators abandoned the vehicle and then ran down Borough Market, armed with knives and wearing fake explosive vests. They started stabbing people outside the Boro Bistro pub. Ignacio Echeverría, a Spanish lawyer who had been practising his hobby of skateboarding in the vicinity, hit one of the terrorists with his skateboard, buying time for other members of the public to escape to safety. Echeverría and four other people were stabbed to death. There were many have-a-go-heroes that night who thwarted the attackers by throwing bottles and chairs at them, even though, for all they knew, the explosive vests the terrorists were wearing might have been genuine and could have detonated at any second. Most of the people who Di and I saw on the street and who warned us back had been fleeing from the attack on Borough Market. The attack came to an end when Butt, Redouane and Zaghba were shot dead by armed police.

The following morning Di and I were in a sober mood as we left the hotel to catch our flight to Barbados. We had a good holiday, and life returned to normal upon our return. But on June 3rd, 2017, our life changed due to the chaos we had witnessed. We had experienced a terrorist attack up close and it is not something we will ever forget. It was a fairly stark and brutal reminder of how your life can change in an instant in the post-9/11 world.