Blood-curdling screams at 4am: How 90 minutes of panic and fear unfolded as rampage which killed three leaves Nottingham in a state of shock
- Hooded knifeman hacked at the 19-year-olds who were 5 minutes from lodgings
- Read more: Former England hockey player named as second rampage victim
The horror began with ‘awful blood-curdling screams’ just after 4am as two students walking home from a nightclub were ambushed by an attacker dressed in black.
The hooded knifeman hacked at the helpless 19-year-olds, who were just five minutes from their lodgings and apparently targeted at random.
A witness recalled: ‘Being a hot night, I had the window open and I just heard some awful, blood-curdling screams. I looked out of the window and saw a black guy dressed all in black, with a hood and rucksack, grappling with some people. It was a girl, and a man she was with.
‘She was screaming “Help!” I saw him stab the lad first and then the woman. It was repeated stabbing – four or five times.
‘The lad collapsed in the middle of the road. The girl stumbled toward a house and didn’t move. The next minute she had disappeared down the side of a house, and that’s where they found her.’
The hooded knifeman hacked at the helpless 19-year-olds, who were just five minutes from their lodgings
Pictured: The victim named locally as Grace Kumar
Speaking to the BBC, the witness added: ‘The attacker then just walked off up Ilkeston Road towards town, as calm as anything.’
Paramedics tried in vain for 40 minutes to revive the pair, named locally as Grace Kumar and Barnaby Webber, but could not save their lives. Within an hour, another victim had been stabbed to death, a man in his fifties on Magdala Road about a mile and a half away.
Police now believe the knifeman stole this second man’s white van and then drove around Nottingham hell-bent on carnage. Police are investigating whether the van was flagged down or the driver attacked as he went to get in.
READ MORE: Nottingham incident news LIVE: Witnesses describe woman crying for help as rampage leaves three dead
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Around 5.30am there was a scream as a woman made the grim discovery of the van owner’s bloodied body in the street near Magdala Tennis Club. Delivery driver Miklos Toldi, 37, and his wife Petra had been heading to work in their car. They live just 100 yards away and stopped their car at the same time as another motorist.
Mr Toldi, a Hungarian national, said he saw the body lying in the street with stab wounds, adding: ‘There was blood trailing down the road. The blood looked as if it was fresh. He was lying on his side, his mouth was open and there was no movement.’
Mr Toldi said it took police just two to three minutes to arrive at the scene following a 999 call. Another neighbour remembers hearing a ‘loud bang’.
Bibi Garbutt, 85, a former opera singer, said: ‘At 5.30 there was a loud bang that woke me up. It sounded like an explosion, I thought it was a bomb going off.
‘I went on to my balcony in my dressing gown and heard somebody running but didn’t see anything and went back inside. I was scared.’ By now, Nottingham police were frantically trying to keep pace with the horror as they dashed to multiple incidents and calls came in from across the city.
On Milton Street in the city centre, outside the Theatre Royal, the nine-year-old Vauxhall van was being used to mow down pedestrians at a bus stop, also at around 5.30am.
Witness Lynn Haggitt saw the driver apparently speeding up and slamming into people.
She told the BBC: ‘He looked in his mirror, saw a police car behind him, he then quickened up.
Raid: Heavily armed counter-terror police outside a property in Nottingham
‘There were two people, two in the corner – he went straight into these two people. The woman went on the kerb, the man went up in the air – there was such a bang. I wish I never saw it, it’s really shaken me up.
‘The woman was sitting up on the kerb, she looked OK.
‘The man was laying down, but then he got up, sat on the side waiting for an ambulance. I can’t believe he was able to get up after the head wound.’
Another witness, Frances, told Sky News she had just got off a bus with around 40 others, and ‘all of a sudden, you heard a bang which sounded like a vehicle hitting a bollard’.
She added: ‘I turned around and then saw the two people on the road. Someone was screaming.’
When asked if she thought the collision was deliberate, Mrs Haggitt, who works at a B&Q store, said: ‘He didn’t even bother to turn – just went back straight into them.’ She described the van driver as having dreadlocks and a beard and wearing a hat.
A third pedestrian was also knocked over, and all three were taken to hospital. One of them, a man, was in a critical condition last night, and the other two had minor injuries, said police.
According to witnesses, police were now in hot pursuit of the white van as it headed out of the city centre.
READ MORE: Van that mowed down three people during Nottingham rampage ‘was bought secondhand on eBay’
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About a mile north, on the corner of Maples Street and Bentinck Road, the van – bearing dents and a cracked windscreen from the pedestrians – was brought to a stop and armed police fired Tasers at the driver.
Dramatic video showed two officers pinning him to the pavement. Witness Grace Mambi said officers were screaming ‘Get down, get down!’ Demi Ojolow, a student who lives in the road, said: ‘They dragged him out of the car and he just fell on the floor. He was still pretty wrestling at that point.’
Neighbour Dimitrious Lawani added: ‘He was being quite resistive – very resistive from what I could tell – and he was also making a lot of noise but I couldn’t really distinguish what he was saying.’
Kane Brady, a University of Nottingham student, told GB News: ‘We woke up to shouts of “armed police” and what sounded like some very loud noises, what sounded like gunshots – it was that loud.
‘I looked out the bedroom window and saw Tasers. I saw a man being dragged out and pinned to the floor. I saw him getting arrested, him trying to resist. I then later saw when they opened the van – I saw a large knife being pulled out and then straight away that’s when police closed off both roads.’
Fearing a marauding terror attack was under way, armed police from Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire swarmed into the city centre.
Swathes of the city were placed into lockdown with road closures, tram and train services cancelled, and police cordons set up on roads across the centre and in the northern suburbs.
Arrest: Officers pin a man to the pavement after stopping a van north of the city centre
Ambulances, fire engines and specialist officers dressed in body armour and helmets flooded the area along with National Inter-Agency Liaison Officers clad in burgundy-coloured uniforms, part of an elite force set up in the wake of the Manchester Arena bombing.
Uniformed officers knocked on doors asking for CCTV footage, while squads of heavily armed officers swooped on several addresses in Ilkeston Road. Neighbours of one of the raided properties said officers had battered down the door and repeatedly asked two students if they knew a black man who lived at the address.
Bella Crawshaw, 20, a first-year computer sciences student, said she was asked by officers if she ‘hung out’ with a black man from the address. She said: ‘We know our social groups and we know who comes in our house.
‘Also the people we are with, they are very like “don’t do drugs, don’t hang out with the wrong people and stuff.”’
Last night, the investigation into the rampage was pivoting away from it being a suspected terror attack towards the suspect’s mental health.
The 31-year-old being questioned over the three deaths, and injuries to three others, is understood to have no previous criminal history.
Just what led to the attacks remained a mystery. Sources said the suspect in custody is an immigrant of West African origin. He is not a British citizen but also not an asylum seeker.
Due to the chaotic and random nature of the rampage, counter-terrorism officers had travelled to Nottingham to help with the investigation but pulled back when the facts became clearer.
It is not known whether or not police have been able to question the suspect yet.
It is likely he will have needed a psychiatric assessment before being quizzed about the incident.
A team of detectives was yesterday investigating his background and speaking to friends and family to establish the full facts of the horrific attack which has left the city in a state of shock.
No other arrests have been made and the police said they were not looking for anyone else.
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