London square where Aussie girl was stabbed known for underbelly of pickpocket crime, rough sleepers
Harrowing new details have emerged of how an 11-year-old Aussie girl was stabbed in broad daylight at a lively London square.
World
Don't miss out on the headlines from World. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Leicester Square is a frenetic hubbub of activity; a place almost every tourist to London visits for its restaurants, casinos, cinemas and theatres, including the famous West End.
But it also is where the city’s far less shiny underbelly appears, with a catalogue of everyday pickpocket crime and homeless people asleep in doorways.
Mid-Monday morning, these two worlds collided.
Outside the TWG Tea shop between Piccadilly Circus tube station and the Lego store, an 11-year-old Australian girl was grabbed by a stranger, forced into a headlock and stabbed eight times in front of her shocked mother.
Romanian national Ioan Pintaru has been charged with attempted murder and will return to court for trial in September.
One witness recalls hearing “a blood curdling scream that I’ll never forget”.
“I was sitting in the square, around the corner from the attack, when I heard first one scream, then several more,” the teacher from north London, who does not want to be named, said.
“Everyone seemed to stop but they started moving again and I thought maybe it was kids just playing.
“A few minutes later, I ended up on the part of the square where the attack had happened. There was a huge amount of police and two helicopters circling overhead. But the only clue as to what happened was a cloth filled with blood. I realised something terrible had happened
and that I had heard it.”
The tea shop’s security guard instinctively rushed across the pavement to where the little girl was being attacked.
The guard, who later gave his name as Abdullah, 29, was recognised on Thursday for his bravery at the Pakistani High Commission in London.
He told the audience that he’d been on duty at 11.30am when he heard a scream.
“I saw there was a guy and he was stabbing a kid. I didn’t think anything, I just ran towards him, jumped on him, grabbed his hand with the knife and got him down on the floor. I kicked the knife away and held him down with a couple of other guys for four to five minutes, shouting for the police,” he said.
“My colleagues came and we gave first aid to the kid. The police came and arrested the guy.”
Abdullah explained his motivation: “I used to watch Pakistani military academy passing out parades. Always, I was motivated that, whenever there was a chance, I’m going to take it. I will ask my Pakistani community, be brave. If there is anything wrong going on, go and protect them.”
When this reporter returned to the TWG Tea shop on Thursday, it was heaving; back to business, with the traumatic event probably unknown to the throng of tourists buzzing around.
One of Abdullah’s fellow security guards stood at the same door.
Of his colleague, he said: “He’s a good guy, I’ve worked with him for a long time. I liked him before. I like him even more now.”
Just a few hundred metres away, on the other side of the Square sits the home of LBC, the UK’s biggest commercial talk radio station.
Every month, breakfast show presenter Nick Ferrari broadcasts to an audience of 1.3 million, but on Monday was almost lost for words when one of his team phoned with the awful stabbing news.
Ferrari had left the studio just 30 minutes before.
His daily routine makes him a ringside spectator to the two opposing faces of the locale.
“At Christmas time or soccer time, there’s an almost Dickensian-style depravity, people lying in doorways, young couples copping off – all human life is there at 6am before I start my show,” he said.
“Then when I come back out around 11am, it’s probably the busiest place in London for tourists, all intent on getting their Lego and M&Ms.
“It’s everything we’ve been since 2012. We’re an Olympic city, buzzy and fantastic, but there’s a sinister dark side tourists fear to tread, and with reason. I’ve had a couple of moments myself.”
In a spaghetti restaurant on Leicester Square, a waitress tells of an incident just last week, when a mother and son sat dining near the door.
“A man walked in, put a newspaper on the table and started talking to them. Only when he walked away did they realise he’d stolen their phone under his paper. The teenager chased after him and got his phone back without an argument. It was clearly how the man made his living. But he could have had a knife.”
Knife crime is a huge issue in the UK. According to the Home Office, there were 50,500 offences involving a sharp instrument in England and Wales in the 12 months leading up to March 2023 – a 72 per cent increase on 2014/15.
Metropolitan London recorded more than 15,000 knife offences in the year leading up to March 2024, including almost 12 attacks per day.
The recent stabbing deaths of three young girls at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport, Merseyside, reignited calls for more action on the sale of knives.
Ferrari laments such a dreadful, apparently random, event taking place in a key tourist area in the middle of the day.
“There are people on the street who are ticking time bombs. This isn’t the way to protect people,” he said
Australians living in London are well aware of the city’s knife crime epidemic and “avoid areas known to be sketchy”.
“When I first moved to London, I definitely felt a bit worried,” Jack, who moved over from Perth five months ago, said.
“I’ve not had any experiences yet to prove that right, so now I feel pretty safe.”
Day and night? “Sure. I avoid areas known to be sketchy, but you soon get the vibe.”
Tom, who is over visiting Jack, agrees: “You do hear, internationally, of knife crime in London, so it’s something you consider when you come here, but it’s not something
I’m going to alter my behaviour for. I’ve not avoided anywhere on that basis.”
“These incidents are fortunately very rare,” Ferrari said.
“We’re a great welcoming city, Leicester Square has its own marshals, but these episodes are undoubtedly awful.
“That little girl was a tourist. We should be welcoming her with open arms, and instead she’s having plastic surgery in one of our hospitals. It’s a terrible thing to happen.”
More Coverage
Originally published as London square where Aussie girl was stabbed known for underbelly of pickpocket crime, rough sleepers
Grave escalation the world feared
A new video appears to show long-range ATACMS missiles fired by Ukraine into Russia for the first time.
‘Get WWIII going’: Huge Russia escalation
Months ago, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin identified a glaring “red line” for the West. Joe Biden has decided to cross it.