How the Huntingdon train attack unfolded - and what comes next
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 4 November 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Saturday evening, passengers on a train from Doncaster to London King’s Cross suddenly found themselves in the path of a man wielding a large kitchen knife. In the terrifying minutes that followed, there were scenes of horror and acts of bravery. So what happened, could the attack have been prevented, and can passenger safety be improved?
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Guests:
- Izzy Lyons, reporter, The Sunday Times,
- Theo Usherwood, political reporter, Times Radio
Host: Manveen Rana
Producers: Micaela Arneson, Shabnam Grewal.
Read more: What happened on the train in Huntingdon? How stabbing attack unfolded
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Photo: Getty Images.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From The Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story. |
| 0:06.4 | I'm Manvine Rana. |
| 0:11.7 | I was on the train with my friend Vanessa. |
| 0:14.6 | We were going from Nottingham to go into London for just a night out. |
| 0:18.7 | And we just listened to music, just having a good time. And then I |
| 0:22.1 | see that five rows ahead of me, a guy in a white t-shirt just jumps out of his seat. And I was |
| 0:28.6 | thinking, what, what's happened? And then people started shouting from our coach, oh, he's got a knife. |
| 0:34.4 | It was like some unimaginable Halloween horror. |
| 0:38.3 | An ordinary Saturday, with a train full of people making their way to London, |
| 0:44.3 | some in costume for Halloween-themed parties, |
| 0:47.3 | and suddenly a man wielding a large knife was on the rampage. |
| 0:53.3 | Everyone's running. building a large knife was on the rampage. |
| 1:02.0 | Everyone's running. A guy next to me is holding his arm covered in blood saying he got stabbed. |
| 1:09.7 | An attack on a moving train with no way of getting off. People ran from carriage to carriage. |
| 1:13.3 | Some with little children locked themselves into the toilets to hide. It was horrific. It was really horrific. There's a guy with a knife, |
| 1:18.6 | stand with everyone and you don't know if you're going to be next. I suddenly heard people |
| 1:21.9 | screaming and shouting, run, run, run. At this point, I see people running past me covered in blood, |
| 1:28.2 | and that's when I realised this is serious. |
| 1:35.4 | What do we now know about how this attack unfolded? |
| 1:40.1 | Could it have been prevented? |
| 1:42.0 | And what lessons can we learn, if any, about how to keep passengers safe? |
| 1:55.2 | The story today, the Huntingdon Train Attack So it was a little after 8pm on Saturday evening. |
... |
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