Kris Holland and
Shivani Chaudhari
Passengers have described blood-covered seats and attempting to protect themselves with a bottle after a mass stabbing on a LNER train left 10 people seriously injured.
British Transport Police (BTP) received reports of multiple stabbings aboard Saturday's 18:25 GMT service from Doncaster to London King's Cross * and the train was met after an unscheduled stop in Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire, having last stopped at Peterborough.
Hiding in buffet car
Alistair Day, who was travelling back to Hertford having watched Nottingham Forest, was on the train when the attack happened – having narrowly missed his original connecting service.
He joined others and hid in the train's buffet carriage as a fellow passenger * confronted a man with a knife.
“I was just by the buffet car. It was odd. I was at the end of the carriage. All these kids were running up and I thought it was like a prank – Halloween or students,” he said.
“Then they're getting louder and louder any sorts of people with blood on them [appeared] and I thought, ‘Oh, bloody hell, this is not good.'
“I saw a guy flailing out – a fracas with arms going everywhere. I didn't see him that well because there were people in front of him.
“My initial thought was I'm going to sit there and try and do something but I changed my mind.
“We all jumped up and everyone kept running but I was next * to the buffet car and the guys in the carriage were trying to close up the shutters and everything.
“So I said, no, you've got to let us in here. So I jumped in there – there were about 12 of us in there.
“I was the first one in, so I was in the corner. A young woman who I spoke to afterwards was by the window and the guy was at the window with his knife trying to get in. Obviously we'd locked it by then.”
Whiskey bottle
Olly Foster, a passenger * on the train, told the BBC he initially heard people shouting “run, run, there's a guy literally stabbing everyone”, and believed it might have been a Halloween related prank.
He said within minutes, people started pushing through the carriage, and he noticed his hand was “covered in blood” as there was “blood all over the chair” he had leaned on.
An older man “blocked” the attacker from stabbing a younger girl, leaving him with a gash on his head and neck, Mr Foster said.
Passengers around him used jackets to try to staunch the bleeding.
He added that the only thing people in his carriage could use against the attacker was a bottle of whiskey, leaving them “staring down the carriage” and “praying” that he would not enter the carriage.
Although it lasted 10-15 minutes in total, Mr Foster says the incident “felt like forever”.
Describing the scene when he got off the train, he said: “There were three * people bleeding severely. One guy was holding his stomach and there's blood coming from his stomach and going down his leg.
“He was going ‘help, help, I've been stabbed'.”
The train's only other scheduled stop before King's Cross * was due to be at Stevenage in Hertfordshire.
Wren Chambers, who was due to get off at Stevenage, said they first became aware something was wrong when a man bolted down the carriage with a bloody arm, saying “they've got a knife, run”.
Wren said they and a friend ran to the front of the train and saw a man who had collapsed on the floor.
Wren said they felt “stressed and pretty scared” once they knew what was happening, but they were eventually able to get off the train unharmed.
“There was quite a lot of blood on the train, there was some on my bag, some on my jeans,” she told BBC Radio 5 Live.
“As soon as the train stopped and people got off most of them ran outside trying to get away from it, because we knew the attacker was still inside on the train.”
Other witnesses have spoken of seeing a man with a large knife and passengers hiding in the toilets, The Times * reported.
One man told Sky * News he believed he saw the suspect tasered before he was arrested.
He said: “Essentially, as they got closer to him, started shouting, like, ‘get down, get down'.
“He then was waving a knife, quite a large knife, and then they detained him.
“I think it was a Taser that got him down in the end.”
London Underground worker Dean McFarlane told the BBC that he saw the train pull into Huntingdon railway station at 20:00 with a passenger * bleeding.
He said that on arrival, he saw multiple people running down the platform bleeding, with one man in a white shirt “completely covered in blood”.
He said he grabbed people and told them to leave the station, and tried to assist passengers who he believed were having panic attacks.
