Sign Up
..... Australian Property Network. It's All About Property!
Categories

Posted: 2017-03-22 20:08:20

Updated March 23, 2017 14:36:13

A clear picture of exactly what happened when Britain's Parliament and surrounding area was attacked is still emerging.

Numerous eyewitness accounts have given us some sense of what happened in these attacks that authorities are treating as acts of terrorism.

These are some of their accounts:

Reuters photographer Toby Melville was on the footpath below Westminster Bridge taking photographs for a story about Brexit when he heard a body land near him.

"I heard a thud, turned round and there was a man lying about 10 yards away from me," he said.

"There was a lot of blood coming from his head. I thought this must be a domestic or horrible accident.

"The noisiest part I can remember is the initial thud, which I'm sure was the shock in my mind of hearing the bloke landing behind me.

"At which point I thought this looks like it's more than someone's fallen over the wall.

"Of a dozen or so people, some of them seemed to be conscious. I didn't know there had been a vehicle involved at the time, someone said 'bus', someone said 'car' someone said 'shooting'.

"It was just surreal and it was a fairly quick computation that this was a serious incident and a lot of people injured."

Poland's former foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, says he was in a taxi leaving Westminster and was checking his email when he heard something like a car crash.

"I look up and I see that a person is lying on the pavement. I started my camera and I saw more people lying on the street and on the pavement," he said.

"People started running up to them. I saw one person who gave no sign of life, another man was bleeding from his head. In all, I saw five people who were at least seriously injured."

Mr Sikorski tweeted a video of the injured being treated on Westminster Bridge.

Steve Voake had travelled from Somerset to visit London and was walking along the Westminster Bridge when a bus abruptly stopped.

"Suddenly everyone started screaming. When I looked around there were bodies everywhere and then I looked over the edge of the bridge and there was a body floating in the water," he said.

"Nobody had any idea what was going on so we just started trying to get everybody off the bridge.

"I was walking across the bridge and suddenly a bus stopped and people started screaming.

"There were a couple of bodies on the other side of the bridge and then the side I was on there was a body in the water with blood around it and then quite quickly a police launch came up and then there was a medic motorcycle.

"And then pretty quickly the police started arriving. They were very quick in fact starting to get people off the bridge.

"Somebody said they heard bangs but I didn't hear that, I just heard screams.

"It's very difficult to say but I think I saw three people on the ground being treated and the one in the water and there were bits of clothing. I would say they were pretty badly injured. One of them was covered.

"First of all I thought somebody had been hit by a bus and there'd been an accident, then when I started looking around and people screaming I heard someone say 'a terrorist attack.'"

Witness Rick Longley said he saw a man stab a policeman outside Britain's Parliament.

"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," he 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."

Rob Lyon was standing near Big Ben and he described the moment the attacker's car rammed into pedestrians near Parliament.

"And then I heard a big sort of crunch," he told the ABC.

"Sounded like a car crash but almost like crunch of a wheel on a kerb.

"Then I saw the vehicle mount the kerb, and it was coming at us so quickly. I saw some people be hit in front of me.

"And then I looked around me in shock because I could see bodies and people. Yeah, real shock."

British MP Grant Shapps said on Twitter that he was walking through the cloisters of the House of Commons to vote when he heard four gunshots. Police told lawmakers to get down on the ground and crawl to cover.

"Police response instant. Heard commotion, looked round. Police weapons drawn, four shots, police ordered us to hit ground and get back, get back," he said.

Baroness Elizabeth Barker, a member of the House of Lords, was at a Tube station on the Jubilee line when she heard the station was being evacuated.

"I went to the nearest platform and another tube came in and I was trying to stop people getting off the train because there were parties of school kids and they didn't understand what was happening. I was just saying get back on, get back on.

"We do have safety barriers and stuff like that and they can be effective up to a point but if somebody's going to do something they're going to do something," she said.

ABC/wires

Topics: terrorism, united-kingdom, england

First posted March 23, 2017 07:08:20

View More
  • 0 Comment(s)
Captcha Challenge
Reload Image
Type in the verification code above