Simatchenko, 55, was pictured in British newspapers on Wednesday as he moved in an attempt to thwart the fleeing knife-wielding assailant as police stod on the sidelines. Clutching his camera in one hand and a Marks & Spencer carrier bag in the other Simatchenko became an instant hero in the British press but brushed his intervention aside as "nothing" and did not tell his wife and son, a chef, of the incident until his picture appered in Wednesday's newspapers.

Born in Ukraine in 1956, Simatchenko moved to St Petersburg, then called Leningrad, and worked as a policeman for five years. He moved to London with his family in 1996 in search of a new life after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

Simitchenko has a go at the attacker