"Your first thought is obviously, there has been a bar incident, maybe a fight or something," Senator Dastyari told Fairfax Media. Senator Sam Dastyari Credit:Alex Ellinghausen "And then suddenly you start hearing screams running down the street, right in the heart of the market, and this sense of panic suddenly takes hold of the entire vicinity and the restaurant. "It was a very different kind of screaming from the one you get if there has been a fight and someone has punched someone ... it ran through the whole area. It was contagious. "So the restaurant locks up, there are 37 of us in there and we decide with the manager that we are gong to go upstairs and get away from the windows.

"Five minutes later, the police arrive and they are clearly going through an extensive lockdown procedure. Emergency personnel on London Bridge Credit:AP "This was not random police running around, this was lockdown, lockdown, lockdown, and they ask us how many people we had there, and then said there had been an incident, they were securing the area and they would not be able to give us more information until they knew more about what was happening, but stay away from the windows." Around half an hour later, the police returned to the restaurant to evacuate them. Police officers clear the area near Borough market Credit:Dan Kitwood

That's when Senator Dastyari began to get a real sense of the carnage. "We had to go past where the stabbings had been, so perhaps 15 to 20 metres away," he said. suddenly you start hearing screams running down the street, right in the heart of the market, and this sense of panic suddenly takes hold of the entire vicinity Senator Sam Dastyari "There was blood everywhere, there were paramedics making the very tough call between those who they were deciding to treat on the spot and those they were trying to get away to hospitals ... it was hard to say how many wounded, possibly six, a few, I couldn't really tell, and this was well into it by then, 30 or so minutes after the incident, so I don't know how many others had already been taken away." He said social media reports were putting the epicentre of the attack at the Black and Blue restaurant, next door to the Arabica where he and his group were dining.

According to one eyewitness who took to Twitter, three men came into the Black and Blue and "started stabbing people randomly with a knife", he said. Senator Dastyari said the feeling while his group was trapped in the restaurant was one of overwhelming confusion. "What was coming through on social media were reports of a car incident on London Bridge and it was not marrying with the reality of what we were seeing then and there ... that's obviously been clarified now, but at the time there was a real disconnect." Senator Dastyari said he was feeling some shock.

The streets had been packed because of the fine weather and the Borough Market was full of younger patrons. "It's horrific, just horrific. You're out in London, it was quite a young crowd of people in that restaurant district. It's not that dissimilar to what you do back on Sydney on a weekly basis." He said only a few hours before he had met London mayor Sadiq Khan. "I asked him what is the one part of being mayor that you were not expecting, and he goes, the challenge of dealing with incidents like what happened in Manchester are the reality of being mayors of big cities," Senator Dastyari said. "It doesn't matter how well you train your police, it doesn't matter how good the security agencies are, the reality is dealing with these issues is always personal.

"I'm having that conversation with him at 2 o'clock and then at 9.30, having dinner, a stabbing incident just 15 to 20 metres from where you were. It's confronting." Senator Dastyari said he was in London on a self-funded trip to "support some friends who are running for parliament. Four of us decided to go out". Loading But he said while such events brought out the worst, they also brought out the best in people. "You see how people were helping each other, especially when they were evacuating, the elderly getting help, people helping one another while they are dealing with shock ... it's amazing."