Unarmed civilians had to defend themselves with chairs during the terrorist attack on the London Bridge and the British capital's Borough Market Saturday night - because the police at the scene had run away - The Guardian reported.
The ramming and stabbing attack, which left 7 innocent people dead and 50 wounded, followed a terrorist bombing by a radical Islamist at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester last month in which 22 people were killed and over 100 were wounded.
Guardian reporter Lisa O’Carroll reported live from the scene of the attack as it occurred Saturday night. Witnesses told her that they had seen police fleeing the scene of the attack.
"Witnesses said they saw two men stabbing people outside the well-known Roast restaurant in Borough market. A chef from the nearby Fish restaurant said: “I saw two guys with big knives downstairs outside Roast. They were stabbing people. The police were running away, they were community police. They were normal officers, they were running away," O'Carroll wrote.
The witness told O'Carroll that armed police only arrived and opened fire on the terrorists after civilians began throwing chairs at them to defend themselves.
“The guy with the knife was killing two people. We were shouting ‘stop, stop’ and people threw chairs at them. Police came and shot straight away,” the witness said.
Journalist Onan Coca, the Editor-in-Chief at Liberty Alliance media group and the managing editor at Constitution.com, speculated that the police officers whom the witness described as "normal, community officers," fled because they were also unarmed.
Ordinary police officers in London do not carry fire-arms, and are instead armed only with batons and mace. The lightly armed police are forced to engage attackers at close range instead of being able to fire from a safe distance, putting their lives at greater risk during incidents such as Saturday's attack.
During the attack, police used a new warning system, called "run hide, tell," for the first time, The Guardian reported. As the attack began, the police issued a warning to London's citizens to flee from any threat.