At 2pm on Sunday, a teenage boy walked into Theo’s, a cafe next to a park in Uxbridge, grabbed two bottles of Lucozade from the fridge and approached the till.
After handing over a handful of coins, he pulled a metal canister from his pocket and sprayed its contents into the face of the cafe’s female owner. Then he sprinted out of the door and disappeared.
Emergency services were called and paramedics spent an hour treating the terrified woman, a 27-year-old mother of one.
‘Her eyes immediately became red and swollen,’ recalls her partner, Erhan Sahin, 36.
‘They washed them out with fluid. We don’t know what was in the can, but it smelled a bit like spray paint, and the stuff they used to treat her is the same as they use in acid attacks.’
Police took forensic samples away for testing and began searching the area for the mystery attacker, who had been wearing a black baseball cap.
Three hours later, they found a youth who matched his description and carried out an arrest. But then this already sinister series of events took a chilling turn.
As the suspect was being detained outside Theo’s, a man who identified himself as the boy’s father appeared. According to Erhan Sahin, he proceeded to make a bizarre effort to justify the attack.
‘The guy was pointing at the cafe and telling the police that the family who run this place are racists,’ Sahin tells me.
Pub Landlord Erhan Sahin, 36, is pictured at The Three Steps Pub in Cowley High Street
John Reilly - pictured - has in recent months named around 55 different establishments in his sights, largely in and around West London where he lives, for ‘discrimination’ claims
At 2pm on Sunday, a teenage boy walked into Theo’s, a cafe next to a park in Uxbridge, (pictured) grabbed two bottles of Lucozade from the fridge and approached the till
‘He kept saying, “look at the videos online!” and telling the cops, “these people got what they deserved, they are racists, it’s all over Facebook”.’
The incident – over which the Metropolitan Police tell me ‘a 14-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of assault occasioning actual bodily harm’ – marked the culmination of a deeply traumatic 18 months for Erhan and his partner, who remains so shaken that she has asked not to be named.
It has not only seen their young family subjected to an appalling campaign of abuse, both via social media and in person, but now represents an existential threat to their livelihood.
‘We’ve had so many death threats, I must have ten different crime numbers from reporting them. My missus has been shouted at in the street. It’s been hell. They have targeted my disabled in-laws, and my four-year-old son. The level of hate, you wouldn’t believe.’
To understand what exactly has been going on, we must walk 500 yards up the road from Theo’s Cafe to the couple’s other business, a flat-roofed pub named The Three Steps. It was here, at around 6.40pm o...
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