‘They kept coming to try to stab me … they were stabbing everyone’

At Belushi’s on Borough High Street on Sunday, the terrace was packed with young people enjoying the warm weather as they munched hamburgers and knocked back cocktails. A few metres away, beyond the police cordon, stood officers dressed in black fatigues and body armour and armed with automatic rifles.

"It feels worse than Manchester, really," said Martin Black (42) as he scanned the row of police vehicles on the street. "Not because it's here but because it could happen anywhere and anyone could do it again."

The streets around Borough Market look shabby in daylight but they come to life at night when people from all over London pile into the area's countless bars and restaurants. Saturday night was unusually balmy and the bars were packed with fans watching the Champions League final when three attackers started their rampage by mowing down pedestrians on London Bridge.

A man called Mark told the BBC he was taking photographs on London Bridge when he saw the van hitting pedestrians on the bridge.

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“It was swerving from side to side and I could see it hitting people and there was a group about 20 or 30 yards in front of me. The van hit those people. At that moment I was doing that calculation of trying to work out which direction should I run,” he said.

Long blades

The three attackers jumped out of the van, carrying what one witness described as long blades and started running towards Borough Market.

Gerard Vowls (47) had been watching the Champions League final at the Ship pub in Borough. He was at the start of the south side of London Bridge and saw a woman being stabbed by three men 10 or 15 times.

“She was going, ‘Help me, help me’ and I couldn’t do nothing,” he said. “I want to know if this girl is still alive. I’ve been walking around for an hour and a half crying my eyes out. I don’t know what to do.”

Mr Vowls said he was throwing chairs, glasses and bottles at the attackers in a bid to stop them. “They kept coming to try to stab me … they were stabbing everyone. Evil, evil people.” It took at least 10 minutes for armed police to reach the scene, he added.

Another man told the BBC: “They literally just started kicking them, punching them, they took out knives. It was a rampage really. A woman was staring at them, and they started stabbing her,” the witness said. “Throughout the whole way across the bridge, there were people littered across bleeding. People were trying to help each other.”

Ben was outside Borough tube station. “I saw a man in red with quite a large blade. I am guessing 10 inches. He was stabbing a man, maybe three times, fairly calmly. It looked like the man maybe had been trying to intervene but there wasn’t much he could do. He was stabbed quite coldly and slumped to the ground.”

Throat cut

Alex was in the Mudlark pub, close to Southwark Cathedral. “A woman probably in her early 20s staggered into the pub and she was bleeding heavily from the neck and from her mouth. It appeared to myself and to my friends that her throat had been cut,” he said. “People went to her aid. The pub was then closed. We saw police on the roads nearby. As we were told to leave the area by armed police, as we were running away from there, I could see to my left there was a further individual having CPR performed on them by the emergency services.”

Owen Evans (39) was in the Wheatsheaf pub nearby on Stoney Street with friends when shooting broke out.

“I was in the back of the pub. A wave of about 30 people ran in and tried to get into the cellar or cupboard. Then there were shots outside. They didn’t seem real – like a kid letting off firecrackers. We saw police lights and everyone got down under a table. People turned tables over.

“We waited about 10 minutes or so, with several shots every couple of minutes. Someone at the front of the pub had been shot – it’s speculation but we thought it was by accident, there were bullet holes in the windows. The people near the person called for a medic, shouting: ‘He’s f**king bleeding to death, we need a doctor.’ The bar staff were amazing, I think they locked the door so no one got in.

“Then they told us to leave the pub and to run, and a policeman standing outside with a gun was shouting, ‘Go, get the f**k out.’ We ran down the street, turned left at the Market Porter, then ran down the road and away. We got to the South Bank and then waited ages for a tube, and eventually got home.”

(Additional reporting: Guardian service)