A fearless tour guide, who makes a living driving tourists around London in a beautifully restored Mini Cooper, played a vital role in subduing a maniacal terrorist on London Bridge at the weekend.
Thomas Gray, 24, was still wearing his chauffeur’s attire when he stamped on the knife-wielding terrorist’s hand and forced him to release one of two kitchen knives, according to reports from London.
Terrorist Usman Khan, 28, murdered two people and injured at least three others in the attack on London Bridge on Friday, before bystanders wrestled him to the ground, sprayed him with a fire extinguisher and whacked him soundly over the head with an enormous, 2-metre-long tusk from a narwhal, a type of whale.
Police then shot Khan dead.
Tour guide Thomas Gray was among passers-by who helped subdue Khan.
“I don’t consider myself a hero, I’m just a Londoner doing his bit,” Gray said.
Gray reportedly works for the bespoke tour company Small Car Big City, which takes visitors around London in a fleet of restored Mini Coopers. A British icon, the Mini Cooper was made by the British Motor Corporation from 1961 to 1971, then again from 1990 to 2000.
Khan was a convicted terrorist involved in the so-called Stock Exchange plot in 2012, a planned Christmas bomb attack on the London Stock Exchange. The plotters also planned to bomb the US Embassy and the home of Boris Johnson, who was then Mayor of London and is now Britain’s Prime Minister.
When Khan was sentenced in 2012, the judge called him a “serious jihadist” and warned that he should on no account be released while he remained a threat to the public.
In what seems to have been an appalling blunder, Khan, from Staffordshire in the English Midlands, was later freed from prison on an electronic tag, which he was still wearing when he began stabbing people on Friday while wearing a fake suicide vest.
In a bizarre postscript, another passer-by who fought the terrorist and tried to help one of his victims has been identified as James Ford, 42, a convicted murderer. The Guardian reported that Ford, who was jailed “for life” in 2004 for strangling a young woman and slitting her throat, was on London Bridge at the time.
Written by Peter Needham
