A DOG walker told last night how she chatted with fugitive terror suspect Daniel Khalife on a park bench the day before his arrest.
Gabriella Lewis said the ex-soldier, who was on the run after escaping from prison, told her he had just left the Army.
She said she noticed his injured ear had been badly stitched with fishing line and felt uncomfortable at how close he was sitting to her.
Gabriella, 52, said: “So to break the ice I said, ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’.
“He replied, ‘I’ve just got out of the Army’, which I thought was a strange way to start a conversation. I just said, ‘Oh. That’s good’.
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“I thought if he had just left the Army he might have post traumatic stress disorder, so I was trying to be nice to him.”
Khalife, 21, was finally arrested on Saturday after a 75-hour manhunt involving 150 anti-terrorism police.
Yesterday, he was charged with escaping from HMP Wandsworth and is due to appear before Westminster magistrates’ court today.
It comes as about 40 inmates were moved from the Category B jail in what Justice Secretary Alex Chalk called “an abundance of caution” during the investigation into how he broke out.
Khalife was in Wandsworth awaiting trial, accused of planting a fake bomb at his barracks in Staffordshire and gathering information that might be useful to terrorists.
He escaped last Wednesday by strapping himself under a food delivery lorry wearing a prison-issue chef’s uniform.
He was caught on Saturday morning in Northolt — 12 miles from the prison.
A day earlier, Gabriella said he sat next to her on a bench at Chiswick House and Gardens in West London.
She said: “Considering he had been on the run for two days he didn’t look dirty at all. He actually looked very clean.
“But his ear looked like it had a bit missing or it had split. It had stitches in it but not like the kind you get from a doctor. It looked like he had used a blue fishing line.
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“He was walking along the path and he clocked me sitting on the bench.
“He asked me for the time which I thought was suspicious. I was worried that if I got my phone out of my bag to check, he would steal it.
“It felt like he didn’t want to leave the bench. So I told him it was around 9.15am and that I had to go. It was such a surreal incident.”
