When a man wielding a kitchen knife threatened shoppers at Kay’s kosher supermarket in Golders Green, shelf stacker Bruno Teixeira grabbed the nearest thing he could – a broom – to help protect the shop where he has worked for almost three years.

On Monday, after a man pulled out a knife and threatened the staff and customers, the staff jumped into action. 

Teixeira, a Portuguese father-of-one, displayed incredible courage when he confronted the assailant using nothing but the wooden broom.

He told the JC: "Nothing like this has ever happened while I've been at the shop. To pull out a knife is the most dangerous thing you can do. I couldn't believe it.

“It’s not fair that he had a knife and other people had nothing. Then I saw the broom and, well it is just a broom, but I had to use it.”

His primary objective was to disarm the knife-wielding man. "I thought that if we could take the knife, that would help. We wanted to take the knife off him," he added.

Bruno Teixeira with his improvised weapon helped to protect customers

Another employee, 22-year-old Breno Camargo, with just five months at Kay's under his belt, grabbed a child's scooter and used it as a makeshift shield to try to help.

“I was scared when I saw the knife,” Camargo said, but he was ready to use the scooter “to push the attacker away and to try and get him to drop the knife.”

Breno Camargo who used a child's scooter as a shield

Teixeira, who was on his lunch break during the attack, said he had to help and would do it again. Downplaying his actions, he said: "It is not heroic. It was just natural for me."

The shopkeeper, Evyatar Reitman, 48, used a shopping trolley to block the knifeman.

The incident began when the suspect entered the shop and became argumentative. Reitman said: “I could see the hate in his eyes. He looked like he came in looking for a fight.

“He came to ask about Israel Palestine and seemed to want us to say we were pro-Israel so he had a reason to attack.

“He demanded: ‘What's your side? Where do you stand on Israel and Palestine?

“I replied, ‘I don't discuss politics’. I thought he was going to stab my son. We managed to walk him out. That’s when the fight started.”

Meanwhile, Reitman’s 18-year-old son, Yosef Chaim, drew on the Krav Maga skills he had learned at school before also ramming a shopping trolly into the knifeman, he told the JC.

Yosef Chaim said: “He told me I live here, let’s go around the corner and speak. I didn’t want to do that, I said let’s stay here. That’s when he got very angry and he grabbed my neck.

"I learned Krav Maga at school and other martial arts, from years 5-7, baruch Hashem. I tried to tackle him and restrain him. I wanted to stop him.

"That’s when people shouted ‘knife’ and I quickly let go, even before I tried to trip him over he had the knife out.

“He went towards my father with the knife. Then he went towards me.

Hashem gave me the idea to take out one of the trollies and then I pushed it against his stomach to try and repel him. He kept coming at me. As he started coming towards me I quickly threw the trolly towards him."

“I tried scaring him off with the trolley. Everyone was telling me to run away and move so I pushed into him with the trolly one more time.”

Kay’s does not have permanent security staff, but one colleague remarked: "With them around, we do have security."

Nobody was injured during the attack and the suspect was arrested at the scene by the Metropolitan police after being subdued by the shopkeepers and Shomrim.