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London Bridge location 'was crying out' for barriers’

The inquest into the London Bridge terrorist attack on 3 June 2017 has heard how the failure to install barriers on London Bridge following the Westminster Bridge attack was ‘unreasonable’.

Gareth Patterson QC, representing six of the eight victims’ families, told the inquest that it had been a mistake not to take such preventative action to avoid a recurrence of the attack on Westminster on 22 March 2017.

Khuram Butt, Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba used a similar modus operandi, mowed down pedestrians on London Bridge before stabbing people in and around the Borough Market area.

One month before the London Bridge attack, Sergeant Matthew Hone wrote in an email to City of London police colleagues that the location was probably his ‘biggest concern’ in terms of an attack of low sophistication, the Old Bailey heard. The bridge had already been identified as being in the top five of likely sites for an attack in the City of London.

However, the location was deemed as not meeting the criteria for installing barriers, namely a specific threat or large public event.

Jane Gyford, who was the City of London police commander of operations and security at the time, told the inquest: “There was no intelligence picture to suggest London Bridge was going to be the site of an attack and therefore we were looking at the picture as a whole and we were taking action.”

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