Irish witnesses describe panic-stricken scene during London attack

A Dublin-based doctor and her boyfriend have described the chaos as crowds of terrified people fled Borough Market after the attacks in London on Saturday night.

Dr Naz Mansour was in the city visiting her boyfriend, Colm O’Dwyer. They were eating dinner at a restaurant in the market when they saw people running.

Mr O’Dwyer said a father was carrying his son or was “just dragging him along with him, telling him to run”.

“A lot of people seemed agitated. We saw the bouncers and security guards from next door run into the market and they ran back out in pursuit of quite a large guy who went and ran into the pub next to the restaurant we had been eating in, at which point a group of people were running towards us,” Mr O’Dwyer said.

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Speaking on RTÉ’s This Week programme, Mr O’Dwyer said he and Dr Mansour looked back to where they had been sitting, and people were coming from the pub into which the man had been chased.

I heard somebody talk about how somebody had tried to stab him or he had been stabbed – I can't remember very well what he said

These people knocked over the tables where the couple had been dining as they fled, and Mr O’Dwyer and Dr Mansour began to run with the group, he said.

“Everyone was quite shaken. I heard somebody talk about how somebody had tried to stab him or he had been stabbed – I can’t remember very well what he said.”

Mr O’Dwyer had first thought that the man being chased was a security guard. “He was of a similar build, but he was being chased by about three gentlemen. Strangely enough they were the security guards, the bouncers that I had been looking at the whole night, from the pub next door, and the restaurant we were eating at, actually. At that point there were no police.”

Everything escalated

Mr O’Dwyer could not say what happened after the man entered the pub but everything seemed to have escalated from that point on.

He said there had been sirens at the end of the street “for a good 15 minutes” while the couple were finishing up dinner and eating dessert.

“I thought that was quite strange, I didn’t know exactly what was happening. The sirens stopped and the three squad cars drove down past us and just carried on driving past slowly. A few minutes after that is when the commotion kicked off,” he said.

There were police on the scene but they hadn’t been pursuing on foot.

“About three to five minutes after we had ran around the corner with the group of people we were with, we did hear gunfire. Quite an exchange, coming either from the bridge or where we had been at, around the market. It was quite a quick flurry but quite a few bullets were flying, obviously.”

Mr O’Dwyer said there were no police on the side streets outside the main thoroughfares.

“There was just a lot of tourists, a lot of confused tourists. Clearly a lot of people didn’t know what was happening or hadn’t heard yet.”

Dr Mansour described how a “mass” of people had run from where the blue lights and sirens had been earlier.

They were talking about the attacks, saying people were stabbing and there was “a guy stabbing” and urging people to run.

“We ran around the corner and then everyone started running again, so we just kept running.”

I could see it in his eyes that he had seen something terrible but he couldn't and wouldn't go into detail

Speaking on the same programme, Irish-born journalist Redmond Shannon, who arrived at London Bridge not long after the attacks took place, said police were pushing a cordon, screaming loudly at bystanders and journalists to get back.

One woman told him she had seen someone performing CPR at the scene.

Another young man had been so traumatised that he could not speak about what happened.

“I could see it in his eyes that he had seen something terrible but he couldn’t and wouldn’t go into detail. He said he saw a knife,” Mr Shannon said.