TC woman ‘totally unaware’ in Westminster Bridge terror attack, London inquest hears
A TURKISH Cypriot-origin woman was “completely unaware” of a vehicle speeding towards her seconds before she was mown down in the 2017 Westminster Bridge terror attack, an inquest in London heard this week.
Khalid Masood ran down and killed four people on the bridge, including mother-of-two Aysha Frade, 44, before stabbing a policeman to death and then being shot dead by another officer.
Mrs Frade, whose late father Taylan Ahmet came to the UK from Paphos, was thrown 17 metres into the path of an oncoming bus after being hit by the car driven by Masood. She was the first to die in the attack, which happened while she was travelling to pick up her eight and 11-yearold daughters from school, and was looking at her phone just before being hit.
Graphic CCTV footage of the moment the car struck Mrs Frade, who worked as a personal assistant at the independent DLD College in London, showed her being thrown into the air and propelled forwards under the rear wheel of the bus. Her husband and two sisters closed their eyes as the footage was played.
The inquest heard that Mrs Frade’s Portuguese husband called her phone soon after she was run over and that a bystander answered, telling him: “There’s been a terrible accident.”
A paramedic told the court that when he arrived at the scene two minutes after receiving a 999 call to go there, he “knew instantly that she was dead as her condition was incompatible with life”
A woman police officer sent to the bridge after the incident broke down in tears as she gave evidence. PC Kirsty Bambrough told how she went through Mrs Frade’s bag and found a letter from the school her children attended. She then contacted the school to tell them what had happened.