[Chapter Four]
As far as the story goes, the terror attack that occurred on Saturday 3rd June, 2017, in the Borough of Southwark involved a Hertz rented van crashing into railings overlooking a sub-street level precinct, the Green Dragon Court, situated close by to the Barrow Boy and Banker pub. Three men, the driver and two passengers, then supposedly jumped out of the vehicle and moved swiftly to a set of steps whereby they could descend to the lower area to attack patrons of the Boro Bistro, located there. Other bystanders were assailed as the terrorists encountered them along their way.
So much for the story: curiously, there was not a single piece of evidence produced, at the inquest into the deaths of the victims of the so-called London Bridge terror incident, which could soundly support it. As heavily surveiled as London is, and despite bus-mounted CCTV informing that a reasonable amount of people were milling about on Borough High Street just moments before the attack, those who drove the inquest could not produce very much witness that could, or was willing to corroborate the official narrative. Indeed, through a number of pieces already published in this FBEL series, it is becoming clear that the van, after it had allegedly steered into several pedestrians coming over London Bridge, did not serve as transport for people who then committed knife attacks on foot. It appears the two elements were exactly that, with the van serving as a diversion for a team already in place to deploy into the Green Dragon Court. Three people who were said to have exited the van may well have entered the courtyard as a second wave, but it is highly unlikely that they originated from the van.
Depending on his level of exposure to the brutal reality of State crime, the reader will either be unsurprised or shocked to discover that, despite London being the most thoroughly surveiled city outside of China, there is no CCTV footage that can prove that anyone disembarked from the van at all. This is, apparently, a complete accident of happenstance; for whatever the permutations were for any array of surveillance equipment that was operating in the area, it was defeated by the orientation of the van, which arrived and situated itself in such a manner that the camera mounted on the Barrow Boy and Banker could not capture the vital information. Here’s some dialogue between a questioning QC and a representative of the Metropolitan Police, taken from the inquest transcripts, that explain the situation most adequately:
We are now looking at CCTV from a camera on the Barrow Boy & Banker facing south down Borough High Street. We will see the van come into view before colliding with the railings. The time on the footage is, I think, not right. The correct time puts the impact at 22.07.17?
That’s right, sir.
If we keep our eyes focused on the van, we will see that the attackers do not exit from the offside because, as you have told us, they all exited from the passenger side.
[2/62/2-12]
Unfortunately, this information conflicts with testimony given by one who could be called a star witness because of how two key nodes of the narrative depend upon him. Erick Siguenza’s evidence is used to locate the attack on James McMullan as having taken place on top of the stone steps down to the Green Dragon Court (the other example will be dealt with in another article). This is in spite of a calamitous and glaring paradox within Siguenza’s own testimony that the Queen’s Counsels who drove the inquest did not bother dissecting. The reader will be able to find it for himself:
What I saw was the driver stepping out the van and then followed shortly about 5 or 10 seconds after, I think 5 seconds after him, the other two terrorists stepped out from the passenger side and came around from the back of the van towards where the driver’s side was, and that’s when they attacked a woman who was on the floor.
[5/27/15-20]
What this says is that the driver got out of his side of the vehicle. If he got out of the van first, he wouldn’t go through the passengers to leave by their door. Moreover, this clearly says that the passengers returned towards the driver’s side in order to commence an attack on Sara Zelenak (supposedly, the name of the woman referred to in the testimony). Siguenza would also say:
As soon as the van had crashed they stepped out, the driver I believe was the one that stabbed the woman that had jumped out to sort of get out the way of the van crashing, she was still laying on the floor and that’s when they started stabbing her, and I believe there was a gentleman there with the woman that had fallen over and he was trying to help her up, and that’s when he was stabbed as well.
[5/28/18-25]
Confusion reigns in Siguenza’s account. The gentleman referred to was identified by the inquest as James McMullan, attacked in the same place as Sara Zelenak, which – according to Siguenza – was in very close proximity to where the van crashed. Unfortunately, the official line that the inquest would otherwise establish is that these two became prey at the stone steps, which are separated from the van by a length of pavement. There is no great distance involved, but in the duration it took the attackers to traverse it, it presented an opportunity for them to inflict non-life threatening injuries on two men. McMullan and Zelenak were not the first to be knifed, as Siguenza suggests they were.
Siguenza, then, is an unreliable witness, and yet his account forms the basis of the history of McMullan according to the inquest (this, of course, is just more grist to the mill regarding the utterly unsatisfactory way that the inquest dealt with the death of James McMullan – please see the FBEL article dedicated to the subject). The expensive and learned Queen’s Counsels who drove the inquest were not concerned with the contradictions that were so calamitous to their storyline. As is Establishment par for the course, they risked a little cognitive dissonance safe in the knowledge that 99% of Britons, figuratively speaking, cannot tie their own shoelaces, and that any dissonant appreciation would be rationalised or rejected. There would not be any widespread alarm at the disregard of damaging minutia to an official narrative.
It is not an inaccuracy to say that there was no other evidence presented at the inquest by which it could be determined with absolute certainty that any attackers got out of the van. Indeed, even when there was a golden opportunity for it to be demonstrated, it failed to materialise. The eyewitness Richard Livett, who saw the van crash and was then set upon by an attacker, did not even report seeing anyone get out of the van. Here is a lengthy extract from his appearance at the inquest, beginning with a statement that indicates that he saw the van crash:
As I say, I was expecting, the trajectory it [the van] was on, to come right towards me. It seemed to have veered at the last moment and then crashed straight into the railings, which I felt the shudder against the railing – – the fence there… As we look at the picture there [referring to a photograph], I was the nearside of the van, you can just see the wheel of a bicycle to the left -hand side, and I remember being up against that. That’s what I think I remember.
So you were on the passenger side of the van, on the viewer’s side of this photograph.
Yes…
In your statement you say that you had the impression that you needed to check that the occupants were all right?
I was — as far as I can remember myself, I think I moved towards the van for that purpose, yes.
How close did you get to it?
I don’t think I was very far away from the red electrical box.
So within a yard or so?
I think pretty close. I think so.
As you approached, was the passenger door open or closed?
I’m not aware.
What was the next sight that greeted you?
The next sight that greeted me was a man ran straight up and right into my face and screamed “Allahu Akbar”.
[6/5/19-23 & 6/6/4-10 & 6/6/17-25 & 6/7/1-7]
What is incredible about Livett’s account is how he is totally unaware that the attack that was carried out on himself had supposedly emanated from the van. That he didn’t notice if the passenger side door was open or not is astonishing. If he saw the van crash, and then approached it from the passenger side to investigate, how could he possibly have been surprised by an attacker in the way he appears to say he was?
There are, of course, plenty of other witnesses who said they did not see anyone in or with the van pretty much only moments after the van had crashed.
Melanie Schroeder, and her friend Harriet Mooney, were sitting in the Boro Bistro al fresco dining area, and didn’t have to move much in order to look at the van; extracts from their written statements follow:
I heard a bang or a crash, and some rubble fell down on to the tables opposite us. It sounded like a car crash. I was opposite Harriet and saw the rubble falling hard after I heard the noise. I couldn’t see up because of the canopy blocking my view. There were about four tables between us and the tables where the rubble fell.
I had to duck down and to my left to look up, and when I did, I saw the front of a van up against the railings and a pole next to the van. The railings were like concrete, with concrete slats, but looked like a fence.
I would describe the van as white with orange writing on it. It was crumpled, but not as bad as I thought it would be. I could see about halfway along the van and the front doors were shut. I didn’t see anyone in it or with the van.
[9/26/4-18]
The next thing I can remember was a massive bang or crash sound. I could hear glass shattering. The sound was coming from directly behind me. I turned and looked over my right shoulder and saw that above us, 3 to 4 metres, a van had driven into the railings. I could see the front of the van where the driver would sit, but could not see the whole of the van. I’ve described the van as a white van, relatively big. It was an average van size that you see on the street. The front of the van was damaged and dented and I think the railings were shaped around it. I didn’t see anyone at all with the van.
[9/35/5-16]
Back up on street level, the regular doorman as the Barrow Boy and Banker, Rasak Kalenikanse, had shepherded smokers back into the pub as the van, looking like it was out of control, careered over the bridge towards his location. He was inside for a moment as the truck crashed, but soon after emerged to find the van empty, with all the doors closed. He noticed that the driver’s air bag had deployed, and says that he tried to open the driver’s side door (that he used the word tried probably indicates that he couldn’t open it).
Kalenikanse is very likely the character who features in Dusan Trivic’s written account, from which an extract follows:
I saw the van crash into the railings surrounding the square. I’m surprised it didn’t go straight through the railings. The railings didn’t even move. The front end of the van went into the railings like a pancake. The van hit the railings just above from where I locked my bike up.
Another guy then left the pub and we both ran over towards the driver’s door. I could see the driver’s passenger airbag had been deployed and I was expecting to see someone in there, possibly injured. I heard the other man shouting “there’s no one in there”. I couldn’t believe what this guy was saying to me. I thought how could this happen and it made me doubt whether I had in fact seen the van being driven towards me.
I thought the driver must be an athlete, he was so fast. Looking back, I do remember seeing a glimpse of a guy’s face, just the side profile. I remember seeing facial hair in the shape of a beard to the right side of his face. I have an image of this as the male as he left the van from the passenger’s door. It all happened so quickly I didn’t really get a good look at this guy.
[7/115/2-23]
Trivic appears to have an understanding that one person left the van, and his is an unusual way of putting things. He doesn’t report seeing the disembarkation, but he can see it in a visualisation. However, this is not enough to comprise reliable witness, because having the idea that one has seen something can be introduced by suggestion. Be that as it may, if it is allowed that Trivic saw a man leaving by the passenger door, he didn’t see this individual or any other person supposedly from the van make their way to Green Dragon Court. He saw one person in black, who he had not necessarily linked with the van, appear in the area:
[He was] about 6-foot 2 tall , short black hair and Asian appearance. I could see him running through people, pushing and barging them out of the way. He was violently, aggressively pushing people, which is the kind of behaviour I would expect from someone trying to get away.
[7/116/12-17]
Trivic is not clear, but it appears that he saw this male “disappear along an alley towards the back of the pub.” [7/117/7-8]. Could it be that what Trivic saw was the driver, the only man to get out of the van, fleeing the scene?
Then there is the curious testimony of bus driver, Anton Sobanski, who had the van pass him on London Bridge. He saw it running over a victim during that phase of the overall attack, but his view was blocked by another bus so that he couldn’t see what happened when the van crashed. The question put to him was “Were you aware where the van went after[wards]?”:
Yes. I kind of – – when the van went out of shot, I kind of put my head out the window to hear where it was going and I heard it kind of crash further down, but I didn’t actually hear, like, any more — I heard a bit of commotion noise, but I thought that it was basically finished, and I just presumed somebody had run off. I thought – – in my head I thought one person has just crashed the van and ran off. That’s all I thought and that’s when I shouted across the road to people waiting at the bus stop to call the police, it’s a terrorist attack.
[4/39/11-21]
This is not meaningless. If there was a good reason why Sobanski thought there was one person in the cab of the van, he certainly wasn’t asked about it. And given that he told of how he saw the vehicle both in his mirrors and through his window as it passed him, the failure to try and have his vital knowledge directly entered into the record is very telling. Instead, and much as might be expected, Patterson, QC, would attempt to have Sobanski reaffirm the official narrative by getting him to answer in the affirmative and unqualifiedly to this question:
But you had assumed that the driver or drivers would have run off and not stayed with the van?
[4/52/14-15]
In the end, however, for all the legalistic devices that corrupt lawyers can use in a court to turn the truth on its head, the fact that most witness evidence cannot report of people disembarking the van is tremendously significant, and incredibly damaging to the official narrative. The inquest that asserted that three people in a van were responsible for knife attacks on the patrons of Boro Bistro and others in the vicinity could only rely on two witness accounts. Moreover, one of these was from an unreliable witness, who, as it turns out, also spoke to BBC at the time of the attack. The following excerpts are from The Guardian, the BBC, and The Sun respectively, and the last one presents the full name of the anonymous “Eric” who features as the source for the story:
Another witness, Eric, told the BBC: “Three men jumped out of the van and that’s when they started attacking people on the road. As they headed down the stairs, as they were running towards the people, they were shouting, ‘This is for Allah’.
Eyewitness Eric saw three men get out of the white van. He said: “[They] ran towards the people that they nearly ran over.
“I thought oh maybe they’re worried about them and trying to comfort them because obviously [I thought] it’s an accident.
“[But] they literally just started kicking them, punching them, they took out knives and then they just, it was a rampage really.
“You could hear people screaming, they were getting stabbed.”
Witness Erick Siguenza told BBC News that one of the gang screamed “This is for Allah” as he went on a stabbing rampage in the busy central London streets.
It should not be discounted that, for this incident, Siguenza has been under direction as a “crisis actor” from the very first instant, and placed on scene to feed the narrative of a terror attack to the corporate-media. This would also explain the contradictions in his story as residual script that would inevitably differ to how things would play out on the ground.
The other witness of the two who saw anyone disembark from the van – and who is less untrustworthy – is Trivic. Trivic, of course, only might have seen one man leave the van, and also only might have seen him run away without taking part in the knife attack.
As was stated at the top of this: so much for the story.