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Snipers in Soho

Walking around Central London on Michael Green's big day out.

Central London was brought to a standstill today by a topless 50-year-old man who was angry about not being allowed to drive a lorry. Michael Green walked into the offices of Advantage HGV this afternoon with a blowtorch and what he said were "explosive" canisters strapped to his body, taking hostages and throwing computer monitors, keyboards and filing cabinets out of the fifth-storey windows onto the streets below.

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A bit before lunch, Tottenham Court Road started trending on Twitter. I checked it out, hoping to learn of a particularly irresistible deal on David Beckham’s latest perfume, or that Madhouse had made even crazier reductions on this pair of Lee Cooper jeans I'd been eyeing up. Alas, it turned out that rumours of a hostage situation were spreading like wildfire. Given that the office where the siege was happening was above a Starbucks, the most plausible theory at this early stage seemed to be that somebody had been rejected for a job at Starbucks and flipped – which would at least show that the coffee chain’s selection process was working. But I couldn’t help but think that those Tories who had mocked the Occupy folks for drinking Starbucks had been asking for something like this to happen (ie a man who felt disenfranchised snapping spectacularly).

I met up with VICE snapper Henry Langston and we made our way to the scene as police sirens wailed around us and helicopters buzzed overhead. Whatever we were about to find was interesting enough that people had stopped to watch the news on TVs in a shop window.

I felt like pointing out to them that the event they were watching was happening just down the road. As it turned out, they were probably better informed than us – as we moved on we hit a police cordon, from where we could vaguely make out the office in which a police hostage negotiator was trying to calm down a failed lorry driver/ vigilante hero gone berserk.

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At the cordon, we asked the police for information. As usual, they were blissfully unaware of what was going on. They probably thought it was a test run for the Olympics. That, or these wily foxes knew more than they were letting on.

We marched off in search of a better vantage point, but the police had cordoned off half of the West End. One part of the cordon consisted merely of some police tape, though, so we ambled down the road a bit where we bumped into these guys.

On a side street just off Tottenham Court Road, we spoke to two medical students, Mike and Pierre. "There are rumours that a guy's got a flamethrower, someone came into the common room screaming 'Nanananananana, hostaaaaage!' and I was like, 'What?!'"

I see.

"People were saying that they'd shut down Tottenham Court Road and there was a terrorist attack," said Mike. "There's so much drama and weird rumours. He's so inconsiderate, he should've done this in a rural area."

We were ushered back down the road, and ran into some people who were using their evacuation as an excuse for an afternoon pint. Rumours abounded at the pub. Was it Islamic fundamentalists? White supremacists? A tripped-out LSD freak?

"Apparently some man has failed his exams and has some sort of device, that's all we know," said Shola, whose work building had been evacuated and who didn't seem very sympathetic to Green's situation. "I think he's a nuisance and really inconsiderate. I've got things to do, patients to see, it's not fair."

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We moved on to Warren Street Station. I noticed that one of the cops was wearing a bullet-proof vest. His claim that he had been on a training exercise which involved a flak jacket and he hadn’t had time to change would have been more reassuring if it had not come moments before rumours of snipers on the rooftops began to filter through on Twitter.

The police expanded the cordon, pushing us back across Euston Road. Like something out of Enemy at the Gates, we decided it was time to seek out and shoot us a sniper.

Sure enough, there he was.

We also saw some policemen in sinister looking balaclavas, which seemed to underscore just how much shit had hit the fan.

We then managed to talk to someone who had been evacuated from an office near the hold-up. It turned out to be Carla Buzasi, the Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post.

"We were all in our office, when two men who had been in the office, but who'd managed to escape through a fire escape, came back in and told us that we needed to get out. "We interviewed Abby, a woman who was allowed to leave the situation, who was the one who told us the man had these gas canisters strapped to his body and apparently had a blowtorch with him at the same time. She said that he seemed very distressed and said that he had nothing to live for and wanted to blow the place up. “Nobody knew what was going on. There were no police around at that time. It’s just office policy – if somebody says get out, you get everybody out as quickly as possible.”

At about 3.10PM, the media confirmed that an arrest had been made. A shirtless suspect was led away from the scene by the police and we called it quits. Thankfully, nobody was hurt. Here’s hoping that the office workers haven’t been scarred for life by their traumatic experience. As for the suspect – many will demand revenge, but to what end? That poor bastard is surely the biggest victim in this sorry tale. The word doing the rounds is that he's been royally screwed over by Advantage HGV, which is a company that has a history of screwing people over; of taking their money, declaring themselves bankrupt and resurfacing a short while later under a different name.

The context, of course, is the double-dip recession and the struggle for jobs, and because of that it'll be interesting to see how Green comes out of this – will he be cast as hero or villain? I guess if there are people who revere Raoul Moat for what he did, there are plenty who will see this as Green's heroic Falling Down moment.

Follow Simon: @simonchilds13 and Henry: @henry_langston on Twitter.