Police forensic officers search a white van behind a police cordon on the corner of Maples St and Bentinck Rd in Nottingham after three people were killed. Photo / AP
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
They were two friends on a night out, celebrating the end of their exams. In the wrong place and at the wrong time.
On Tuesday at 4am local time, the students, both 19, and both from the University of Nottingham, were attacked in the street, slashed and stabbed by a knifeman dressed in black.
The male victim was later named as Barnaby Webber, the female named locally as Grace Kumar.
Residents, who had their windows open as they struggled to sleep in the heat, heard the “blood curdling” screams for help from Kumar as she watched Webber being repeatedly stabbed. Paramedics battled to save their lives to no avail.
Their murders were not the end of it.
For the next hour and a half, as police launched a frantic manhunt, the suspect continued his rampage, driving a white van through the city in pursuit of more victims.
Two miles from the first attack another person was killed. Neighbours heard a loud noise as if a bomb had gone off, while passersby found a man in his 50s in the street dying from what they said appeared to be multiple stab wounds.
His van had been stolen by the assailant.
Shortly afterwards three people were mown down in Nottingham city centre, their “only crime”, said the council’s leader, “was to be waiting at a bus stop early in the morning”.
By the time dawn had broken over Nottingham, three innocent people had been killed and three more injured, one of them critically.
The 31-year-old suspect was finally arrested after a police chase that ended around 5.30am when armed officers surrounded the van before dragging out the alleged killer and handcuffing him.
Nottingham was plunged into a partial lockdown with streets shut off and houses raided by counter-terrorism police.
The motivation for the attacks remained unclear. Police said they were keeping an “open mind” but had not ruled out terrorism as a possible motive.
The two students had been out for the night at the end of the summer term, according to friends, at the local club Pryzm, a 30-minute walk from where they would be set upon in Ilkeston Rd, one of the busy roads out of the city and close to the university’s campus.
A witness told on Tuesday of his alarm as he watched the stabbings from his bedroom window.
“Being a hot night, I had the window open and I just heard some awful, blood-curdling screams,” said the resident, who wished to remain anonymous.
“It’s often quite busy with people coming back from town and you get the usual boyfriend-girlfriend arguments, so I thought it was something like that.”
The reality was grim. On Ilkeston Rd, close to the junction with Bright St, a violent, bloody fight was taking place right in the centre of the street.
“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 or boy she was with – they looked quite young.
“She was screaming ‘Help!’ I just wish I’d shouted something out of the window to unnerve the assailant.
“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 towards 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.”
It’s unclear how long the fight lasted. The witness suggested “it all happened within five or six minutes”.
Two bodies lay in the street and the knifeman was gone.
“The attacker then just walked off up Ilkeston Road towards town, as calm as anything,” he said.
He called 999 and police arrived at the scene within minutes. Paramedics spent about 40 minutes trying to revive the pair.
“It was a horrific thing to witness. I’m in bits here,” said the resident.
What happened next remains unclear.
The third victim was found in Magdala Rd, a leafy street lined by large houses to the north of the city centre and it is believed the knifeman stole his nine-year-old white Vauxhall van.
A large section of Magdala Rd remained sealed off on Tuesday.
Bibi Gorbutt, 83, a retired opera singer, whose apartment overlooks the street close to the spot sealed off by police, told The Telegraph how she was woken by an “incredible” noise in the early hours.
“At about 5 or 5.30 I heard an incredible bang. I thought it was a bomb. It woke me up, it was so loud,” said Gorbutt. “I was scared to go out, but I went to my balcony and looked out and I could hear lots of noise, like people running.”
Miklos Toldi, 37, and his wife Petra found the body of the man in Magdala Road as they headed to work around 5.30am. They stopped their car and rushed to the dying man’s side.
Toldi, an Amazon delivery driver, said the victim had clearly been stabbed. He was aged in his 50s with grey hair and black trousers.
He said: “I saw the body lying in the street. 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.”
Toldi said it took the police only about two or three minutes to arrive after a 999 call.
“The man’s knuckles were covered in blood. My first reaction was that he was a drunk lying in the road. The blood was quite fresh,” said Toldi.
Officers turned the man on to his back to start CPR and Toldi said he saw what appeared to be several stab wounds in his chest.
The manhunt was on and with it the race to stop what appeared to be a killing spree.
It is thought that shortly after the murder in Magdala Rd, the van was driven to the city centre.
In and around Milton St, little more than a five-minute drive from Magdala Rd, the van was spotted by a police car. The driver, having seen the police car in his mirror, then accelerated into passersby waiting at a bus stop.
Lynn Haggitt, who works at a local B&Q store, watched in horror.
“It was half-past five and I saw a white van pull up by the side of me.
“There was a police car behind it which came up slowly, no flashing lights,” she said. “The man in the driver’s seat looked in his mirror and saw the police car behind it. The white van then backed up on the corner of the street and went into people.”
She added: “A lady ended up on the kerb, then he backed up the van and sped up Parliament Street with the police cars following him.”
Haggitt said the van appeared to have gone “straight into” the pedestrians.
“He didn’t bother to turn, he just went back, straight into them,” she said. “The man got on his feet, with head wounds. Amazingly enough he got up and waited for the ambulance.
“The woman was sitting on the kerb. I was there for 15 minutes and there was no ambulance. The policeman started first aid.”
The chase was now on. The van would finally come to a halt in Bentinck Rd, about a mile and a half from Milton St.
The arrest was captured on video by a resident in a flat overlooking the street.
Armed police surrounded the van – people thought they even heard gunshots as the man was dragged from the vehicle and handcuffed.
Kane Brady, a student at the University of Nottingham, told GB News he saw a knife being taken from the van after the arrest outside his house.
Brady said: “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 [of the van] 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, Maples Street and Bentinck Road.”
The footage showed clear damage to the van’s bonnet and windscreen: two dents on the bonnet, just above the radiator grille, and two sets of corresponding cracks radiating out from two points on the windscreen.
As the day unfolded, armed as well as local police moved into the city, shutting down roads and conducting searches in the city including houses on Ilkeston Rd.
One of the tenants described the door being “kicked in”.
Bella Crawshaw, 20, a first-year computer sciences student, said police then asked her if she knew of a black man who lived at the address or if she “hung out with one”.
“They kept asking if we knew of a black male who lived at the property,” said Crawshaw, who in shock has decided to return home early to London.
Another house on Ilkeston Rd was raided just before 1pm on Tuesday by counter-terror armed officers seeking clues that might provide an explanation for the attacks.
The raid took place close to where the two students had been killed nine hours earlier. About a dozen officers armed with assault rifles and sidearms and wearing full body armour searched the house.
Their uniforms were emblazoned on the back with CTSFO, short for counter-terrorist specialist firearms officer.
Chief Constable Kate Meynell pleaded for patience and tried to calm fraying nerves.
“This is an horrific and tragic incident which has claimed the lives of three people,” she said. “We believe these three incidents are all linked and we have a man in custody.
“This investigation is at its early stages and a team of detectives is working to establish exactly what has happened.
“We ask the public to be patient while inquiries continue. At this time, a number of roads in the city will remain closed as this investigation progresses.”
The city was due to hold a vigil. Nottingham will one day have to come to terms with an atrocity that for now has no explanation.
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