A 44-year-old man is in custody over the 2017 attack that gripped Putney.
Nine years after the Putney Pusher shoved a woman in front of a bus on Putney Bridge, police on Monday made their first arrest in the case since they gave up on it in 2018. The man they are holding is, the Daily Mail reports, a multi-millionaire banker with royal connections, arrested at his £1.4 million home in west London. He has not been charged.
For Putney, it is the first real movement in years on a case the area has carried for almost a decade, on the bridge thousands of us cross every day. The Metropolitan Police say only that a 44-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of attempted grievous bodily harm and is being held while inquiries continue. They have not named him – for good reason: this case has put the wrong man in the frame before.
It happened at 7.40 on the morning of Friday 5 May 2017. A 33-year-old woman was walking south across the bridge, towards Putney, when a jogger came at her from the other direction. There was room for him to pass. Instead he pushed her off the pavement, into the southbound lane, in front of the number 430 to Roehampton.
The driver, Oliver Salbris, swerved at the last second and missed her head by inches. The jogger ran on without looking back. Fifteen minutes later he crossed back over the bridge; the woman tried to speak to him, and he kept running.
Then came nine years of not knowing. The police sat on the CCTV for three months, and when they finally released it the delay caused almost as much fury as the attack. Detectives worked through more than 50 men and made three arrests, among them an American banker, Eric Bellquist, named around the world before he proved he had been in California that day. By 2018 the leads had run dry and the case was shut, with a single line left hanging: “Should any new information come to light, this will be explored.”
Something did. The case never let go. In 2024 it became a play, Once Upon a Bridge, staged at the OSO Arts Centre in Barnes just across the river, with the real CCTV shown to the audience and the police hoping someone would finally recognise the man. Two years on, they have made an arrest.
Oliver Salbris still drives the 430 over the bridge several times a day, and still can’t stop watching the pavement. “I just can’t help it,” he told the Daily Mail in April. He remembers the woman, in the moments after he stopped the bus, asking him the question no one has answered in nine years. Why? Why? Why me? Nine years on, there may finally be someone who can.
