What have eyewitnesses said about Huntingdon train stabbings?

Passengers said that after the mass stabbing incident on the LNER train, 11 people were injured and after being treated in hospital, the seats were covered in blood and they tried to protect themselves with bottles. 2 of them remain life-threatening.

Police encountered the Doncaster-London King’s Cross train making an unplanned stop at Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire shortly before 20:00 GMT.

Alistair Day, who had returned to Hertford after watching Nottingham Forest, was on the train when the attack took place and narrowly missed the original connecting service.

He joined others and hid in the train’s buffet car as a passenger confronted a knife-wielding man.

“I was by the buffet wagon. It was weird. I was at the end of the wagon. All these kids were running and I thought it was like a prank — Halloween or students,” he said.

“Then the voices of all kinds of people with blood on them grew louder [appeared] and I thought, ‘Oh, shit, this is no good.’

“I saw a man run out; a scuffle with arms flying everywhere. I couldn’t see him very well because there were people in front of him.

“My first thought was to sit there and try to do something, but I changed my mind.

“We all jumped up and everyone kept running, but I was by the buffet car and the guys in the car were trying to close the shutters and stuff.

“And I said no, you have to take us here. So I jumped in there; there were about 12 of us there.

“I was in the corner because I was the first one to get in. A young woman I talked to later was by the window and the man was trying to get in in front of the window with a knife in his hand. Apparently we had locked the door by then.”

Joe was also returning from there. Nottingham Forest-Manchester United matchHe said the scenes were “like something out of a movie”.

The 24-year-old, from Peckham in south-east London, said: “I was texting my friends about my plans for the night and then people came running out of the car and said: ‘You’ve got to run, you’ve got to run’.

“At first he couldn’t really register what was going on.

“Then I quickly dropped my things and started running with them.

“Then when I looked back I could see this man; he was a very tall black male and he had a bloody knife in his hand.

“You looked around and there was blood everywhere.”

Joe continued: “We kept moving through the train and we could see it coming up behind us.

“The scariest thing was knowing there were quite large distances between stops as the only stops at this stage of the journey were Stevenage and King’s Cross.

“So we had no idea how long we would be on the train.

“What was going through my mind was, we’re going through this train right now, but what if we run out of cars to pass through? What if we reach the end of the train? What happens there?

“It all happened so fast. I was really in fight or flight mode.”

Olly Foster, a passenger on the train, told the BBC that he initially heard people shouting “run, run, a man is literally stabbing everyone” and believed it might be a Halloween-related prank.

He said within minutes people began pushing the car and he noticed his hand was “covered in blood” as there was “blood all over the chair” he was leaning on.

Mr Foster said an elderly man “stopped” an attacker from stabbing a teenage girl, leaving a wound on her head and neck.

Passengers around used jackets to stop the bleeding.

He added that the only thing the people in his car could use against the attacker was a bottle of whiskey, prompting them to “look at the car” and “pray” that he wouldn’t get in the car.

Although it lasted 10-15 minutes in total, Mr Foster said the incident “felt like it took forever”.

When he got off the train, he described the scene as follows: “Three people were bleeding heavily. A man was holding his stomach, blood was coming from his stomach and going down his leg.

“He was saying, ‘Help, help, I’ve been stabbed.'”

The train’s only planned stop before King’s Cross was to be at Stevenage.

Wren Chambers, who was going to get off in the Hertfordshire town, said that they first realized something was wrong when a man got into the car with his bloody arm, saying “he has a knife, run”.

Wren said they and a friend ran to the front of the train and saw a man collapsed.

Wren said they felt “stressed and pretty scared” when they realized what had happened, but eventually managed to get off the train unharmed.

“There was quite a lot of blood on the train, some on my bag and some on my jeans,” she told BBC Radio 5 Live.

“As soon as the train stopped, people ran outside to get off the train, because we knew the attacker was still inside the train.”

London Underground worker Dean McFarlane told the BBC he saw the train pull into Huntingdon railway station at 8pm with a passenger bleeding.

On arrival, he said, he saw a man in a white shirt “completely covered in blood” and several people running on the platform covered in blood.

He said he grabbed people and told them to leave the station, trying to help passengers he believed were having panic attacks.