London Bridge terror attack eyewitness gives shocking account of what happened

30 November 2019, 12:24

Deborah was on the bus that stopped next to the terror attack on London Bridge.

Deborah Simmons told Matt Frei about what happened.

She said: "We see a man being held down that, looks like a scuffle. Straight away, I just thought it was maybe a robbery or something and see a lot of commotion going on.

"Then somebody who was on the bus shouted out 'I can see a suicide vest'.

"They were all worried, everybody was scared obviously.

Deborah said that she was still shaken from the event.

She told Matt: "Next thing we know, we see the police shoot the guy."

She continued: "People were shouting there was a vest, my eyesight wasn't quite good enough to see it personally.

"But I knew they were telling the truth because next thing, the police come running down, armed police come to the bus and said 'everybody, off now and run, get to the other side of the bridge and run'.

"I, personally, was going across the bridge and everybody was going the opposite direction towards the attacker.

"I was telling everybody to turn round and go the other way. Police have said run, it's a suicide vest.

"We genuinely thought we were going to get blown up on on the bridge. It was absolutely terrifying.

That's all I can say. Absolutely horrific. Nobody should have to go through it."

Speaking about the decision to shoot the attacker, she said: "Obviously nobody knew that it [the suicide vest] was fake and I do believe that the police 100% had done the right thing.

They had no choice, they had to because, like I said, nobody knew that it was a fake vest."

She later told Matt Frei: "We were the first bus. So of course, we were the first ones to go the opposite direction to where it had happened.

But what we did find was that when we actually got across the bridge, and I told I don't know how many people to get off buses, I was just screaming at everybody to get off the bus, get safe."

She told Matt Frei about hearing multiple gunshots: "So we got to the other side of the bridge, thought we was kind of safe.

"Somebody came running and said there's a shooter and next thing we did hear more shots being fired. Now it definitely wasn't the police because we'd seen him, the terrorists, being shot dead.

"So it wasn't that shooting of the terrorist but we got the other side of the bridge and heard about 10 shots being fired.

"With that, we all ran for a lives. It sounded like they were shooting at us.

We absolutely had to run for our lives. I really thought I was going to be shot dead in the back. It was terrifying."