Twenty-six-year-old Francisco Lopes was one of the many nationalities caught up in yesterday’s terrorist attack outside London’s Houses of Parliament.
He was crossing the road to catch the Tube as the ‘lone wolf’ killer started mowing pedestrians down in his 4x4 Hyundai.
Lopes “suffered profound cuts to one leg and one hand” after rolling off the car’s bonnet and being felled to the ground. But he escaped the ordeal without breaking any bones.
As he told Portuguese journalists he only realised what had happened when he got to hospital, “I was so lucky. One woman who was run down in front of me was in a critical condition”.
Portugal’s Consul-General Joana Garcia visited Lopes in hospital, but confirmed that Lopes is otherwise in good health and does not need consular assistance.
The young man added that he will “not stop working. Perhaps we all all always in danger but I am going to keep going. I am not going to stop because of an attack”.
As so often happens after atrocities like yesterday afternoon’s, messages of defiance and solidarity are doing the rounds of social media as newspapers and television dissect the horrors of the day.
Five people have died - including mother-of-two of Spanish Galician origin Aysha Frade, married to a man of Portuguese origin - and another 40 people were hurt, some with “catastrophic” injuries.
The worst hurt are believed to include French teenagers visiting London on a school trip from Brittany.
As more and more details are coming through, the nationalities of the injured are said to include five South Koreans, a German woman resident in Australia and two Romanians.
Despite the fact that yesterday’s carnage has been blamed on one ‘middle-aged Asian’ “inspired by international terrorism”, police conducted raids during the night, arresting eight people so far - three of them in Birmingham where the Asian man, shot dead after he fatally stabbed a 48-year-old policeman, hired the Grey Hyundai.
By natasha.donn@algarveresident.com
Article by kind permission of Portugal Resident
