EXCLUSIVE: A passenger on the horrific knife attack train reveals what really took place on the ill-fated journey.
A passenger on the journey has told their story (Image: Getty)
A passenger onboard yesterday’s Huntingdon mass stabbing train has revealed how he and fellow travellers feared the attacker had a gun as they ran away from the knife-wielding maniac. Speaking anonymously, the man in his 20s commuting back from yesterday’s Nottingham Forest football match said he missed his booked train by less than a minute, leading him to board the ill-fated 19:08 service to King’s Cross.
He boarded the train and busied himself in typical train tasks – listening to music with his noise-cancelling headphones and texting friends ahead of an anticipated party that evening. However, just 10 minutes into the journey, passengers from the carriage ahead burst through the doors. The eye-witness recalled: “At first I thought it was Halloween, is this some sort of joke? Is it a prank? And that’s when I realised how panicked they looked, and then I saw someone who was covered in blood.”
The only photo our source took before running from the attacker (Image: Express)
“I thought, f*** me, what’s going on here? I quickly realised I needed to get out of there… just joined them moving through the train.
“Someone was [at] first worried there was a gun, someone said ‘oh there’s a guy we think he’s got a gun’, but that wasn’t the case.
“We weren’t able to move super rapidly because A – there were quite a few of us, and B – there was at least one person in our group of people moving through the train who had been stabbed.”
Revealing new terrifying details of one the attackers himself, he added: “We looked back and I could see this tall Black male, early 30s… he looked dead behind the eyes, and he was moving towards us, chasing us with what looked like a kitchen knife. It was bloodied and he was moving through the carriages.
“He wasn’t running towards us, but he was walking with intent, it was quite a spooky walk. He almost looked possessed.
“The most horrifying thing at the time was that we were obviously on a moving vehicle, and we didn’t know how long we were going to be stuck on there.
“The scarier bit was that we were walking through the train away from this guy, but we didn’t know how many carriages we could keep going through before we reached the back end of the train.”
Arriving in Huntingdon, he revealed the short-lived but false relief when the doors opened, explainng that he and fellow passengers had a “weird feeling for like a second where you felt it was over, then you quickly realised this guy was still there”.
A local invited him in for tea following the attack (Image: Getty)
He added: “I didn’t look back, I just got off the platform… people [were] saying ‘he’s coming off, he’s coming off!’”
The passenger said he was holding up despite the terrifying experience, and also revealed acts of heroism and kindness amid the frenzied knife attack.
He recalled a young man in his 20s taking a lead and trying to tend to one of the attacker’s bleeding victims.
“There was a lad really taking the lead, just trying to calm everyone down and trying to make sure this woman was all right and that she got the support she needed. So this guy was shouting ‘has anyone got something like a hard object or any clothes that we can wrap [her injury with]. I had a T-shirt in a bag that I chucked over.”
Standing around in Huntingdon railway station car park, he added that one local passer-by invited him in for a cup of tea and to charge his phone while he waited on a friend to drive up from London to take him home.
This morning the British Transport Police said 11 people have been treated in hospital, and two remain in a “life-threatening condition”.
Two men were arrested on suspicion of attempted murder, a 32-year-old Black British national and a 35-year-old British national of Caribbean descent.
Superintendent John Loveless said the attack is not currently being treated as terrorism.
