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Olly Murs thinks Oxford Street incident was “covered up”

By | Published on Tuesday 10 April 2018

Olly Murs

Olly Murs remains unwilling to accept that he’s an idiot. So, rather than accepting that he acted hastily when he incorrectly tweeted that a gunman was loose on Oxford Street last year, he’s now developed his own little conspiracy theory about the non-incident.

Last November, there was a brief panic at Oxford Street tube station in London due to quickly spread misinformation about an apparent incident during the busy Black Friday sales. Going about his business doing a bit of shopping in nearby Selfridges, Murs did his best to restore calm by announcing to his nearly eight million Twitter followers: “Fuck, everyone get out of Selfridges now. Gun shots! I’m inside”.

Murs’ panicked tweeting led to a heated exchange with Piers Morgan over what sort of thing it was acceptable to tweet to millions of people.

There were no gunshots. Nor any sort of attack at all. It remains unclear what exactly triggered the panic and sudden surge of people attempting to escape the tube station. A similar incident occurred a month later as people crammed into the Boxing Day sales.

Most likely a small panic of unknown origin quickly spread through the large crowds of shoppers that happened to be in central London that day, getting more intense as the panic reached those who didn’t actually know what the panic was about. But Murs still reckons there was more to it.

“Whether they were shooting into the air, or whatever, something happened that day”, he tells The Sun. “Whether it was covered up, I don’t know. It’s all a bit murky”.

FYI – they weren’t, it didn’t, it wasn’t and it isn’t. But Murs still has more to say. He goes on to explain that he’d been in Selfridges to buy his aunt a massage chair for Christmas.

“One minute I’m sitting there and this guy’s saying, ‘If you press this button you get a massage’ – the next I’m getting thrown against a wall”, he says. “And then there’s people screaming and running towards exits and I’m thinking, ‘What the fuck?’ I ran for my life thinking ‘Someone’s upstairs shooting’. The noise of people screaming, it was terrifying”.

He continues: “I found a door and said ‘Guys, quick, let’s go into this office’. We ended up going through this back alley and got about 20 people in. We shut the door and we kept walking. There were people picking up, like, things to use. The manager was in there, other senior people. This woman said ‘Someone was up there shooting, I could see him, in the beauty aisle, he had a gun'”.

This, seemingly, is why Murs believes that there definitely was a shooter, even though the incident didn’t start in Selfridges and there’s no evidence that anything happened at all. But that’s just what they want you to think, isn’t it? This isn’t simply a case of a small incident getting quickly exaggerated through a process of Chinese whispers among a large crowd of people who have recent terrorist attacks lingering in their minds. No, Olly Murs believes this single witness statement over everything else.

“This girl was saying ‘Don’t tell me I’m lying, I saw this guy with my own eyes'”, he goes on. “Whether he shot someone or was shooting in the air – well, obviously he didn’t shoot anyone – but someone saw something”.

At least Murs admits that it would be a bit ambitious for the London police to cover up someone actually getting shot. But either way, what bugs him most about the whole incident is that people still think he’s an idiot.

“I get mocked every day on Twitter”, he moans. “Someone always has a little dig. Well, next time you’re in Selfridges and that happens to you, I’ll message you and say ‘How was that? How do you feel now? You’re not Mr Brave now are you?’ You’re not going to stand there and go ‘Oh, wait a minute, before I make a tweet I’m going out there and see if someone’s got a gun'”.

True, it must have been a terrifying experience. Still, you could, of course, not tweet about it at all. Noting the aforementioned remarks by Piers Morgan to the effect that celebs need to be careful about what they post on social media, he adds: “I agree … Twitter is a place where you have to be careful what you say. But my argument is I did exactly what the police say to do: Run, hide and tell. If I’d done it and someone had been shooting, you’d all be sitting here now going ‘You know what Olly, you’ve done well'”.

They really wouldn’t. I mean, ‘run, hide, tell’ is the advice that police give for people caught up in firearms and weapons attacks. But the ‘tell’ bit is shorthand for ‘phone 999 and tell the police’, not ‘tweet any old fucking nonsense to millions of people and create further panic’.

So, that’s that cleared up.



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