One British lawmaker was hailed by some as a hero in Wednesday’s attack on the British Parliament.
Conservative parliamentarian and Foreign Office minister Tobias Ellwood, whose brother was killed in the Bali terror attack in 2002, performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the police officer who was stabbed and later died. About 10 yards away was the attacker who was shot dead by police after scaling the security wall toward Parliament’s grounds.
Ellwood, who served in the British military, applied pressure to the police officer’s multiple lacerations.
Photographs showed Ellwood’s bloodied hands and face from the police officer’s wounds while the alleged attacker was seen nearby.
Three students on a school trip from Saint-Joseph high school in the Brittany town of Concarneau were among the injured, according to the French foreign ministry.
The ministry said it is in contact with British authorities.
In a tweet Wednesday, French Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve offered support to the British as well as to “the French students wounded, their families and their schoolmates.”
London is a common destination for French school trips.
British port officials said they pulled a woman from the Thames River following the incident on Westminster Bridge.
The Port of London Authority says a female member of the public was recovered from the river, injured but alive.
The authority says it has closed the river between Vauxhall Bridge and Embankment while a major security operation is under way after a suspected terror attack at the Houses of Parliament in London.
Eyewitnesses
Poland’s former foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, said he was in a taxi leaving Westminster and was checking his e-mail when he heard something like a car crash, “something like a car hitting metal sheet.”
“I look up and I see that a person is lying on the pavement. I started my camera and I saw more people lying on the street and on the pavement,” Sikorski said on Poland’s TVN24.
“People started running up to them. I saw one person who gave no sign of life, another man was bleeding from his head. In all, I saw five people who were at least seriously injured,” he said.
“The taxi driver immediately called the emergency number. I heard ambulances within two or three minutes, so the rescue action was really very quick. There is a hospital near there.”
“It all happened so fast that there was no time to get scared,” said Sikorski who posted his video on Twitter.
Witness Rick Longley told the Press Association that he saw a man stab a policeman outside Britain’s Parliament.
“We were just walking up to the station and there was a loud bang and a guy, someone, crashed a car and took some pedestrians out,” he said.
“They were just laying there and then the whole crowd just surged around the corner by the gates just opposite Big Ben.
“A guy came past my right shoulder with a big knife and just started plunging it into the policeman.
“I have never seen anything like that. I just can’t believe what I just saw.”
Lawmaker Adam Holloway told the AP he saw people running and immediately ran into his offices in Parliament to be with his staff. “A lot of us are locked in with our staff at the moment,” he said.

Source: Arab News