Within seconds of the first 999 calls reaching police command centres on Saturday night, armed response vehicles were racing through London, blue lights flashing and sirens wailing.
Three ARVs reached Borough Market within minutes, the officers leaping from the vehicles to locate the suspects. They found the terrorists on Stoney Street, where bars and restaurants were being barricaded.
Eight officers, understood to be from both the Metropolitan and City of London police forces, confronted the three men, who were close to one another and appeared to be wearing suicide bomb vests.
Trained to “locate, contain and neutralise” the threat, the officers took aim and fired 50 rounds, an unprecedented number for a firearms operation in the capital. Within eight minutes of police receiving the first reports of the attack, the killers were dead.
The police officers were praised last night for saving lives by responding with the same speed as special forces units, from whom they have learnt since working together during the July 2005 terrorism crisis in London.
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“They are all trained to go for it,” a special forces source said. “The squeamishness about killing someone has disappeared. There is no hesitation. It’s an important message — this is what happens to terrorists.”
Borough Market on Saturday night presented police with exactly the kind of anti-terrorism scenario that they have been fearing and preparing for since the Mumbai attacks in 2008.
A group of attackers were on the loose, running through one of London’s busiest areas for nightlife and trying to force their way into bars and restaurants to kill.
This was markedly different from the situation at the Palace of Westminster in March when a police protection officer shot and killed the knifeman Khalid Masood after he had driven his car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge.
In the narrow streets around Borough Market, the officers were searching for multiple attackers and there were hundreds of members of the public who might stray into the line of fire.
“The squeamishness about killing someone has disappeared. There is no hesitation
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Gabriele Sciotto had been watching the Champions League final in a bar and came outside to a scene of chaos. “Lots of shots were fired, there were lots of officers shooting — I saw all three of the attackers taken down,” said Mr Sciotto, 25, a photographer, who used his phone to capture the stark image on the front page of today’s Times of one of the suspects, gas canisters strapped to his chest, lying on the ground and an accomplice nearby. Police officers are seen standing over both men pointing their guns downwards.
Mr Sciotto said: “At the moment they were shot it seemed to be just me, the police and the attackers on the street. It was very dark, very confusing — I was really struggling to breathe.”
He was unhurt but another member of the public suffered non-critical gunshot wounds in the operation. As a matter of procedure, there will be an investigation by the police watchdog into the circumstances of the shooting.
Wary that such intense scrutiny is a deterrent to the recruitment of more officers to firearms duties, Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, head of counterterrorism, spoke out strongly in support of those who opened fire.
“The situation these officers were confronted with was critical, a matter of life and death. Three armed men, wearing what appeared to be suicide belts, had already attacked and killed members of the public and had to be stopped immediately,” Mr Rowley said.
“It’s an important message — this is what happens to terrorist
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He added: “I am humbled by the bravery of an officer who will rush towards a potential suicide bomber thinking only of protecting others.”
A police source said that since Mumbai, when Islamist gunmen killed 164 people, firearms officers had been trained to adopt new tactics in terrorist incidents. There was a step change again after the Paris attacks of 2015, which led to a drive to recruit an extra 1,500 armed officers, 600 of them for London.
At any hour of day or night there are between 30 and 40 police ARVs patrolling London. The BMW X5s carry three firearms officers, all equipped with a Glock 17 handgun and Sig Sauer 5.56mm assault rifle.
The source said: “The traditional tactics of ‘locate, contain and negotiate’ are completely inappropriate for this type of terrorism. The new tactic is ‘locate, contain and neutralise’.”
Officers are trained to shoot for the central torso of an attacker, the largest target. If a suicide vest is visible, however, they are told to aim for the head and to continue shooting until satisfied that the threat is “neutralised”.
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The shootings were carried out by police officers but special forces personnel were also deployed to the scene two hours after the incident began over concerns that another attacker might be at large. SAS troops were flown by their helicopter, nicknamed Blue Thunder, from their London base at Northolt, landing on London Bridge.