In the recent brutal murder of a U.K. soldier in Woolwich, London, which is being treated as a terror attack, 48-year old mother of two, Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, has been hailed as hero for confronting the attackers, the Wall Street Journal reports. Loyau-Kennett, a Scout leader, told several media outlets Wednesday night and Thursday morning of her plight after her bus was stopped in Woolwich on a return trip from France to visit her children in London.
Loyau-Kennett described seeing a crashed car and a victim lying on the street, who she tried to help on the scene. "I trained as a first aider when I was a Brownie leader, so I asked someone to watch my bag and then got off to see if I could help," she said to the Guardian.
By the time the attackers confronted her, including a man with "a black hat and a revolver in one hand and a cleaver in the other came over," she had determined the victim was dead.
"I asked him why he had done what he had done," she said to the Guardian. "He was very excited and he told me not to get close to the body. I didn't really feel anything. I was not scared because he was not drunk, he was not on drugs. He was normal. I could speak to him and he wanted to speak and that's what we did.
"He said he had killed the man because he [the victim] was a British soldier who killed Muslim women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was furious about the British army being over there."
When she asked the man what he would do next, "he said it was a war and if the police were coming, he was going to kill them." She said the other suspect was "quieter and more shy."
"I asked him if he wanted to give me what he was holding in his hand, which was a knife, but I didn't want to say that," she said. "He didn't agree and I asked him: 'Do you want to carry on?' He said: 'No, no, no.' I didn't want to upset him," she said to the Guardian.
"I got on the bus and, after 10 seconds, someone came on and told everyone to get down. I saw a police car pulling up and a police man and policewoman getting out. The two black men ran towards the car and the officers shot them in the legs, I think," she said. "When the shooting started, I was not scared. There weres so many women screaming and crying on the bus, it took me a minute to calm them down. I didn't have a moment to think of myself."
When asked about her experience in an interview with British channel ITV's "Daybreak," Loyau-Kennett said she wasn't scared during the incident. "Better me than a child," she said.
"I am just happy that I managed to do something that might have prevented more trouble," she said in the interview. "I feel fine at the moment but I suppose the shock could hit me later."
On Thursday, Prime Minister David Cameron praised Loyau-Kennett for her keeping cool in a tense situation and said "she spoke for all of us" when she told the first attacker "that he could not win the war he said he was hoping to start on the streets of London," explaining that her presence of mind in the moment was "an indication of how Britain would triumph over terrorism by standing together."
