The fiancee of the first victim of the London Bridge terror attacks tried to get him to turn back just before they got on to the bridge because she had experienced premonitions of such an atrocity, an inquest heard.
In an emotional testimony, Christine Delcros said she felt uneasy as she walked with Xavier Thomas towards their intended destination of the Shard on the evening of 3 June 2017, because of the terrorist attacks earlier that year.
Thomas was the first of eight people killed when three attackers drove into pedestrians with a van before going on a stabbing rampage around Borough Market.
On Thursday, the third day of the inquests into the victims’ deaths, Delcros told the Old Bailey: “Just before we reached the bridge I told him [Thomas] that we shouldn’t go there, we should go somewhere else … He said: ‘Why are you saying this to me now?’ I told him that I didn’t know. I had so many premonitions about terror attacks from the day before … but I didn’t tell him, in fact.”
The couple had arrived in England from France that morning having travelled on the Eurostar and spent the day sightseeing. Delcros, speaking through an interpreter, said they had then returned to their hotel for a rest.
Thomas had fallen asleep after asking her to wake him at 9.30pm so they could go to the Shard to see the view. She said she woke him but suggested he rest more and visit the landmark the following day; however, “he absolutely wanted to please me”.
Delcros said that when she suggested they go somewhere else, Thomas began looking on his phone for other places but then they decided to press on to the Shard.
“I remember being on the bridge but at the time I felt there was something that wasn’t normal,” she told the inquest. “I was under the impression there was a lot of light and there was a van that mounted on the pavement … to make sure they weren’t going to miss us.”
She said that after they were struck: “I thought I had died, that the curtain had fallen. To me I was dead. I said to myself: ‘That’s how one dies.’”
As she came round, a passerby was cradling her head and she asked the people around her: “Where is Xavier?” The body of Thomas, a sales manager from Loire-Atlantique, was recovered from the Thames three days later.
Delcros and her interpreter both wept as she told the court: “I’m [still] madly in love with Xavier … nothing can destroy the love we have.”
Holly Jones, who helped comfort Delcros after the attack, also wept as she gave evidence on Thursday. She recalled walking past Thomas and Delcros seconds before the attack and thinking: “They look very happy together.”
Jones said she jumped out of the path of the van, having been alerted to its presence by the sound of the engine over-revving, and saw it hit a group of people and fling a woman into the air.
“I remember looking over and just saw a female [Delcros] on the floor,” she told the court. “My first thought was: where is the gentleman that was with her?”
Jones told the inquest she tried to reassure Delcros that she would be OK but the wounded woman kept asking: “Where’s my boyfriend?”
She said she told two sets of police officers that there was someone in the water. One asked if she saw the person go into the water and she replied she did not, but added: “I saw two people together … and now there’s just one. They must be in the water.”
Dominic Adamson, representing Thomas’s parents and fiancee, raised questions about the speed and scope of the search for him.
The court heard that four boats (two police and two RNLI) were dispatched to search for Thomas after receiving 999 calls that someone had fallen into the river.
PC Nicholas Bultitude was master of the first police boat to arrive at scene, which conducted what is known as a “hasty search” three minutes after the first call was received.
The other boats then arrived to conduct a “structured search” but Bultitude told the court he diverted his vessel away to warn pedestrians on the South Bank not to walk towards London Bridge, given his knowledge of what was happening.
He then evacuated injured victim Sasha Flanders from the Old Thameside Inn, where about 100 people were trapped as a result of the attacks, and transported her to St Thomas’ hospital at high speed. She had been stabbed in the neck, arms and hands.
Asked about his decision to abandon the search, Bultitude said: “I carried out a search of the river and I was satisfied if anyone was in the river floating on the surface in the vicinity of London Bridge we would have found it. When I made the decision, so far as I was concerned, if someone has gone in then tragically they are lost. I made the decision to depart from it.”
The other police vessel was also diverted from the search to help those under threat.
Bultitude told the court that the failure to recover Thomas was not through want of trying. “I’m convinced if Xavier had been on the surface of the river, we would have recovered him,” he said.
The inquest heard Jones initially thought the driver of the white Ford Transit was drunk but became aware of the awful reality of the situation when it mounted the pavement for a second time.
Describing the driver, she said: “His eyes were kind of wide and his arms were flailing all over the place … He looked very focused.”
The others killed were Chrissy Archibald, 30, from Canada; Sebastien Belanger, 36, a French chef; Kirsty Boden, 28, a nurse from Australia; Ignacio Echeverría Miralles De Imperial, 39, from Spain; James McMullan, 32, the only Briton, who was from Brent, north-west London; Alexandre Pigeard, 26, a French restaurant worker; and Sara Zelenak, 21, an Australian national.
The attackers were Khuram Butt, 27, Rachid Redouane, 30, and Youssef Zaghba, 22.
The inquest continues.