Student stabbed in Fishmongers’ Hall terror attack ‘played dead’

“He stabbed me. He stabbed me like punches, I guess. A lot of repeated punches. I could not count how many at the time. It is a little bit fuzzy, I remember his final stabs were in my neck. They were intended to finish me.

“I was on the floor and had closed my eyes. I decided to play dead in case he came back and realised I wasn’t dead straight away. I tried to slow down my breathing and blood flow.”

Rowbotham could not recall if she was attacked once or twice. She tried to use her mobile telephone to call 999 but there was too much blood for her to use touch identification.

The student at Anglia Ruskin university was a part-time office manager for the Learning Together charity, which organised the prison rehabilitation conference attended by Khan.

Khan, 28, had strapped knives to his gloves in a lavatory cubicle before stabbing Jack Merritt, 25, the charity’s course coordinator.

Rowbotham said she was in the hall’s reception area when she noticed Merritt entering from the opposite corner.

“He was shouting that he had been stabbed,” she recalled. “He was holding his stomach and had obviously been injured.

“There was a lot of blood everywhere and it took a bit of time to register what had happened. He was wearing a white shirt and the red blood was obvious. He was hunched and obviously in a lot of pain.”

Khan also fatally stabbed Saskia Jones, 23, who worked with Learning Together.

A housekeeping supervisor at Fishmongers’ Hall described seeing Khan carrying a knife and reciting the Quran after stabbing Merritt.

Ama Otchere said that she initially assumed that someone was unwell when she heard crying from a gentleman’s lavatory.

As she entered, Khan appeared carrying a “long” knife in his right hand at head level while holding a finger to his mouth in a signal for her “not to scream”.

“You can see from his face, you can see the anger,” said Otchere. “He used the knife to stab the lady’s shoulder and I turned my back and ran.”

She said that Khan had been “reciting the Quran” in Arabic.

Khan, from Stafford, Staffordshire, stabbed Merritt, from Cottenham in Cambridgeshire, 12 times. He then stabbed Jones, from Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, in the throat.

He also stabbed Stephanie Szczotko, who worked for Learning Together, and Lukasz Koczocik, a porter at Fishmongers’ Hall who had tackled him. They both survived.

Khan, who appeared to be wearing a suicide belt, was shot dead by police outside the hall. He had been released from prison 12 months earlier having served eight years behind bars after being convicted of planning a jihadist terrorism camp.

Simon Larmour, a research associate for Learning Together based at Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology, escorted Khan from Euston station to Fishmongers’ Hall.

Khan had called in a panic saying his train had been cancelled and Merritt found a replacement, he told the inquest.

Larmour was standing next to Rowbotham as Khan approached carrying two knives. He fled and later helped care for Merritt.

Larmour said he first met Khan when the prisoner joined the charity’s reading group at the high security Whitemoor jail in March, Cambridgeshire.

When he visited Khan at home three months after his release to film a video, he was still unaware that his client had been convicted of a terrorism offence. He said Khan had been “traumatised by his experience in prison”.

Larmour said the charity’s practice is not to discuss their clients’ past crimes but to “talk about how that person was doing, their struggle, emotional state”.

Before the conference he had searched Google to discover that Khan had been jailed for a terrorism offence. They spoke on the telephone a week before the conference when Khan appeared “weird and depressed”.

He said he had no training about the risk of offenders or understanding of the significance of a prisoner still being in high security conditions at the time of their release.

Dawn Batchelor, the receptionist at Fishmongers’ Hall, said it did not search bags of visitors or have a metal detector at the time of the conference.

PC Kate Langtry helped give Merritt cardiopulmonary resuscitation before dragging him outside the hall on a stretcher. She said the doctors performed open chest surgery in the street before saying he had died.

Sergeant Daniel Murphy, who helped with the CPR, said the carpet in the reception office where Merritt collapsed was “soaking wet with his blood”.

The inquests, being held at the Guildhall, continue. A separate inquest will be held into Khan’s death.