For Scot Alistair Neill, the longest 15 minutes of his life were when he fought a murderer on board a nuclear submarine

AT FIRST glance, Alistair Neill would seem to have little in common with John Smeaton. Neill, a 54-year-old council administrator with three children, who is greying at the temples, is an unlikely comparison with the baggage handler who helped foil a terrorist attack on Glasgow airport.

But when he was confronted by what he believed was an unfolding terrorist attack – an able seaman on a shooting rampage on the £1.2bn submarine HMS Astute – Neill, a Southampton council official originally from Milngavie, showed the same bravery that earned “Smeato” the Queen’s Gallantry Medal and the nation’s affections.

Neill shies from the comparison, although he can now talk about his heroics, as Able Seaman Ryan Donovan, 23, was last week sentenced to at least 25 years for one murder and three charges of attempted murder in April .

Neill had been talking to Lieutenant Commanders Ian Molyneux and Chris Hodge in the submarine’s tightly confined control room.

As chief executive of Southampton City Council, he had been invited for a tour of the nuclear-powered vessel as in the event of an emergency he would be part of a command structure, along with local police and fire chiefs, deciding on a course of action.

Just minutes after a group of schoolchildren, who were part of a separate tour, had walked past them on their way out of the 97-metre (318ft) submarine, the men heard an explosion.

“The first bang could have been anything, but it was incredibly loud,” he said. “The last thing I thought was that it was a gunshot. It simply could not be a gun being shot on a £1.2bn nuclear submarine.

“But the second one was closer and it was quickly followed by a third and fourth. Ian stepped two foot towards the corridor and yelled, ‘What’s going on?’ He was shot right in the head. He fell down motionless right in front of me.

“I didn’t have time to explore what was going on in my mind. You react rather than think, it’s only later that you try to rationalise. I thought there could be only one explanation – ‘this is a terrorist attack on the submarine’.

“The gunman stepped over Ian’s body and came right at me. He had this very large semi-automatic weapon, an SA80, which was about three foot long. It’s very powerful and holds a magazine of about 30 bullets.”

It was at this point he thought he was about to be shot, Neill recalls: “He was coming right at me – I was the next person in line. The guy had an absolute manic look about him. When I saw the Norwegian attack it looked like someone who had gone crazy. This guy looked like he had a job to do and he was going to do it all. There was about 15 of us and no way out. We were like fish in a barrel.

“He came at me, I braced myself to be shot and, for whatever reason, he moved the weapon to the left and shot Chris in the stomach.”

Donovan, from Dartford, in Kent, had a grudge against two other senior officers who had reported him for disobeying an order to clean a part of the submarine.

He had already attempted to kill them – Petty Officer Christopher Brown, 36, and Chief Petty Officer David McCoy, 37 – but missed. He only turned his gun on others after being challenged.

Molyneux, 36, from Standish, Wigan, a father of four, died on board. Donovan was convicted of his murder and the attempted murder of Brown, McCoy, and Hodge, who survived despite being critically wounded. Neill says: “Chris looked at me and immediately clutched his stomach. He staggered back staring at me, as if saying, ‘This can’t be happening.’

“My instinctive physical reaction was to throw myself to one side, but space was so tight all I could do was crouch my head down over the satellite equipment to try and make myself small, I could not move my body.

“I found myself staring at Royston Smith, the leader of the council, who was doing the same as me – crouching with his head on the bank of satellite equipment. We were looking at each other with a look of consternation and we arrived at the same conclusion – this was a terrorist attack and we had to get this guy.”

Smith lunged at the killer, grabbed both ends of the rifle with either hand, and then tried to wrestle it off Donovan. Donovan was facing Neill and the gun was jerking in his direction.

Neill says: “I went in on the guy, but the problem was they were holding the rifle so it was pointing out. I remember thinking as I went in, ‘Don’t shoot,’ but he did and the bullet whistled past my head. Later I found that bullet lying at my feet. It was three inches long and as thick as my finger. I went on top of the guy and whacked him as hard as I could and pulled him away from the rifle so the councillor could get it off him.”

At this point, Royston Smith leaned the gun against a wall out of Donovan’s reach. Neill said the councillor thought he saw something down the corridor and went to check, while the naval officers tended to Hodge and he battled to restrain Donovan – whom he remained convinced was a terrorist.

“I brought him down and ground his face down into the floor,” Neill says. “I thought he was a terrorist so I thought he would be carrying a knife, a handgun or a detonator.

“I saw this thing had fallen which looked like a camouflage walkie-talkie. I thought, ‘It has to be a detonator.’ His left hand was outstretched towards it, which was about a foot away from his grasp, while the rifle was maybe 18 inches away.

“The commander and his crew behind me were talking to Chris Hodge who was sprawled out and, I thought, fatally injured. I screamed for someone to come and sit on his legs. He whacked me with his elbow and cracked my ribs. I gave him a few whacks back and tried to subdue him.”

Neill then started to suspect that Donovan might be a suicide bomber: “I realised he was wearing an extraordinarily thick body protector jacket – about an inch and a half thick.

“I thought, ‘This guy’s a terrorist, that’s an explosive jacket,’ so I had to make sure he did not get the detonator.

“The focus then was to get this jacket off him because if he did not detonate it he might have an accomplice who would.”

It was at this point, up to 15 minutes after Donovan had been tackled, that military police officers arrived on the scene and handcuffed him.

“I remember yelling at a member of the crew, ‘Get this jacket off the ship I think it’s filled with explosives.’”

Eventually, Donovan was taken away and Neill climbed 15ft up the submarine’s fin to the world above. “It was like being on a movie set,” he said. “A helicopter ambulance was coming over the water. There was a media helicopter in the sky.”

He sent a text to his wife Kate, who was teaching at the school where his children Rachel, 18, Zoe, 17, and Cameron, 14, were pupils at the time, to let them know he was all right.

Then he called his office to tell them to contact the school from which the children who had visited the submarine earlier, to say they were safe.

Finally, with nothing else required of him, he allowed the enormity of what had just happened hit him.

“I had 30 seconds of the shakes where I had to hang on to the rail,” he said. “Then I went to the police station to give a statement.”

Now, more than five months later, with the killer brought to justice and the knowledge that more people may have been injured were it not for him, he suffers flashbacks.

“I get two or three particular images,” he said.

“One is when the guy looks up at me when I’m about to whack him with my fist, as if to say, ‘You’re not really going to hit me, are you?’

“That’s when I realised this guy is really messed up.

“Then there was a tear running down the side of his face, and I thought I was hurting him, which was good, but it might also have been regret, realising what he had actually done.

“The third is Chris clutching his stomach and looking at me. But basically I get on with it, I deal with it, and it’s OK.”