Alice Aguiar, nine, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Bebe King, six, were killed in the attack, and eight other girls and two adults were also injured.<\/p>\n
The inquiry heard that after the attacker refused to pay for the taxi, Mr Poland saw him go into the Hart Space and then heard the loud bangs.<\/p>\n
“It was terrifying,” he said. <\/p>\n
“You were fearful and in a state of shock. I just thought someone was shooting.”<\/p>\n
He said he then went into “panic mode.”<\/p>\n
Mr Poland also heard the victims screaming. <\/p>\n
He said: “I did what I did because of fear, shock and panic. These are human emotions which I could not control.”<\/p>\n
Nicholas Moss KC, counsel to the inquiry, said in his statement to police Mr Poland described seeing “a massed huddle of children stumble and run in a panicked hurry”.<\/p>\n
The statement described the girls “screaming… it was like a stampede for their lives”.<\/p>\n
Mr Moss also said dashcam footage from Mr Poland’s taxi shows the girls running alongside his vehicle, and showed him looking in the rear view mirror. <\/p>\n
In his statement to the inquiry, Mr Poland said he did not know the children had been injured.<\/p>\n
Mr Moss asked Mr Poland if he accepted that he should have stopped on Hart Street as soon as he was out of harm’s way, and called the police. <\/p>\n
Mr Poland replied: “Yeah.”<\/p>\n
Mr Moss also said a transcript of the phone call he made to his friend had him talking about his belief that the attacker had a gun, but did not show him expressing any concern for the girls. <\/p>\n
Mr Moss asked him if it was fair or unfair that the purpose of the call was “guess what just happened to me”. <\/p>\n
Mr Poland replied: “Unfair.”<\/p>\n
Earlier Mr Poland had said: “I can’t sleep at night. I shut my eyes, I see his [the attacker ‘s] face. He is just there all the time in my head.”<\/p>\n
The inquiry continues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alice Aguiar, nine, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Bebe King, six, were killed in the attack, and eight…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":159535,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-159534","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}