Police have released a video showing two off-duty officers armed only with a piece of wood and golf clubs tackling a man who stabbed one neighbour and badly injured a second after a bitter long-running dispute.
Can Arslan, 52, killed Matthew Boorman, his neighbour in the village of Walton Cardiff in Gloucestershire, stabbing him 27 times, and inflicted eight knife wounds on another neighbour, Peter Marsden.
There is no dispute that Arslan killed Boorman, a 43-year-old contract manager and father of three, but the jury has been told it must decide if it was murder or manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He has also admitted attempting to murder Marsden.
The video shows Arslan, smoking and barefooted, the knife in his right hand, forcing his way into Marsden’s property on 5 October last year, by which time he has already attacked Boorman.
Steve Wilkinson, an off-duty police sergeant who is armed with a piece of wood, tells Arslan: “Put the fucking knife down,” and hits the attacker with the wood. Wilkinson is joined by a second off-duty officer, PC Josh Norris, and both brandish golf clubs as they try to get Arslan to drop the knife.
The jury at Bristol crown court heard on Wednesday that Marsden told police he was making dinner when Arslan stormed into his kitchen. He said: “His eyes I remember were really evil. I instantly dropped what I was doing and ran towards him shouting: ‘Get out, get out.’ At the time I did not know he had a knife on him.”
He managed to force Arslan out. “I was bleeding quite heavily – I laid down on the floor and a neighbour came in and the nurse from up the road just started to put pressure on to stem the bleeding.
“This is something I had been expecting from Mr Arslan. He has threatened to kill me previously. Because of his threats I have spent thousands of pounds on security.”
The court heard that when he was arrested, Arslan told police: “I was a sniper in the army … I killed 50 people in the Kurdish army.”
PC Gregory Jones, who spoke to Arslan the night before the attacks, told the court the defendant told him: “I am a hitman – you will see.” The officer entered the threat into a computer system, and it went live less than two hours before Arslan struck.
