LONDON: As three assailants sought to strike fear at the heart of the British capital on Saturday night, some Londoners showed incredible courage and fought back.
Taxi driver Chris was on London Bridge as the attackers smashed their van into pedestrians around 10:00pm (2100 GMT) before sprinting, armed with knives, toward nearby bars packed with revellers.
“I saw a young girl being stabbed in the chest,” he told LBC radio, recalling how the three “went randomly along Borough High Street stabbing people.”
“I said to the guy in my cab I was going to try to hit him, I was going to ram him. I turned around and tried, but he side-stepped me,” he added.
The attack took place a few minutes after the end of the Champions League final between Real Madrid and Juventus and many fans were watching the football on television in some of the trendy area’s bars.
Gerard Vowls, 47, was heading home after watching the football at the Ship Pub in Borough when he saw a woman being stabbed 10 to 15 times.
“She was going, ‘Help me, help me’ and I couldn’t do nothing,” he told the Guardian newspaper.
Distraught, he followed the attackers to Borough Market — a food market that dates back centuries and is housed in an elegant 19th century structure — and started throwing whatever he could find at them including chairs, glasses and bottles.
“I know it was a silly thing to do but I was trying to save people’s lives,” he said.
He said the attackers chased him after he managed to hit one of them in the back with a chair.
“I knew if I slipped over I’d be a dead man, I’d be killed there and then,” he added.
Seven people were killed and nearly 50 more were injured in the rampage.
The three attackers were shot dead by police outside the Wheatsheaf, a trendy pub on the edge of the market.
Just like the people of Manchester — struck by a suicide bombing which killed 22 people less than two weeks earlier — Londoners rallied together.
Many took to social media, opening up their homes to stranded people while taxi drivers ferried people out of the London Bridge area as quickly as possible.
Dozens of people were also seen sleeping on the floor in the reception area of the Ibis hotel in nearby Blackfriars.
“This is our city,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan said after condemning the “cowardly” attack.
Striking a defiant tone, Khan warned that the British capital “will never let these cowards win and we will never be cowed by terrorism.”
Londoners fight back against terror
Londoners fight back against terror
Isolated Kremlin critics lament lost future at Nemtsov memorial
- Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death
- Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street
MOSCOW: On a bridge next to the Kremlin on a drizzly Friday morning, a lone Russian police officer stood looking at the half-dozen bunches of flowers laying in memory of slain opposition figure Boris Nemtsov.
The symbolism was almost too much.
Four years into Moscow’s full-scale offensive on Ukraine, which has seen President Vladimir Putin eradicate all forms of dissent and usher in strict military censorship laws that have silenced his critics, few Russians dared, or wanted, to pay tribute.
Nemtsov, a longtime Putin opponent, was shot and killed on February 27 2015, meters from the Kremlin’s red walls. He was 55.
Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death, which came on Friday.
This year, there was barely a trickle. Those who turned up were visibly nervous.
“So few people, they’ve all forgotten,” lamented one elderly man, who refused to give his name.
“Everybody is afraid,” a woman standing nearby added.
Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street.
AFP reporters on Friday morning saw only around a dozen mourners alongside Western ambassadors laying red carnations.
“Keep moving, don’t gather in a crowd, don’t block the way for other citizens,” a police officer said through a megaphone.
Three days after Russia launched its offensive on Ukraine in 2022, protesters had staged an impromptu rally against the war at the memorial on the anniversary of Nemtsov’s death.
Nemtsov’s supporters have always accused Chechen leader and key Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov of ordering his killing.
Kadyrov has rejected the claims.
Five Chechens were convicted of a contract killing but investigators never said who it was ordered by.
- ‘Everything is persecuted’ -
For his followers, Nemtsov is a totemic figure in Russian political life — seen as a once-future leader who might have taken the country on a different path.
“I come here every year,” said 79-year-old scientist Sergei at the bridge on Friday.
“Russia should have had — though unfortunately it didn’t work out — a leader exactly like Nemtsov,” he told AFP, declining to give his surname.
“Right now everything here is suppressed, everything is persecuted, people are sitting in prisons.”
A physicist by education, Nemtsov rose to fame in the 1990s as a young, liberal provincial governor, and was widely tipped to take over from Boris Yeltsin.
He gave his hesitant backing to Putin when the ex-KGB spy was tapped to enter the Kremlin instead, but became an early — and fierce — opponent of what he cast as the Russian leader’s creeping authoritarianism.
He had largely lost popularity and was only a marginal figure in Russian politics when he was killed in 2015. Still, his murder shocked the country and the world.
“The hopes of the whole country were pinned on him — of all the people who wanted it to be free here,” said Olga Vinogradova, a 66-year-old volunteer who tends to the pop-up memorial to Nemtsov on the bridge.
“When this man was killed, naturally, all of us were, we were all just executed at that moment. Because our hopes were destroyed,” she said.
“With this memorial, we remind people that there was a different path for Russia. And that there was a real person who could have led us down this path.”
- ‘Forced out’ -
Nemtsov had strongly opposed Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and Moscow’s military backing for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
He was also a close and early ally of Alexei Navalny, who died in 2024 in an Arctic prison in what his supports say was a poisoning.
Open opposition to the Kremlin is unheard of inside Russia since the first days of the Ukraine offensive — when riot police cracked down hard on the thousands that took to the streets to protest.
All major critics of the Kremlin are in exile, prison or dead.
Those that remain have been silenced.
“Many have been forced out of the country, some have been killed,” said Gleb, a 23-year-old photographer.
A movement or person like Nemtsov was “impossible” to imagine right now, he said.
Still, he held on to a slither of hope.
“But everything can change at any moment.”
