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A man believed to be a British soldier was hacked to death in broad daylight by two men with a cleaver in what officials are calling a terrorist attack.

As the victim, dressed in what looked to be a T-shirt for Help for Heroes, a charity for military veterans, lay dying, one of the attackers found a camera.

"We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone," said a meat-cleaver-wielding man with bloody hands.

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"The only reasons we killed this man … is because Muslims are dying daily," he added. "This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth."

One witness, Michael Atlee, described the gruesome, frenzied and ultimately fatal sequence of events Wednesday afternoon as "a bloody mess."

British Prime David Cameron called it a terrorist attack.

"We will never buckle to terror," he wrote on Twitter.

 

A witness, who identified himself only as James, said he saw two men standing by the victim, who was on the ground in the UK capital’s Woolwich neighborhood.

"They were hacking at this poor guy, literally," he told the radio station, as if they were trying to remove his organs. "These two guys were crazed."

"They were just not there. They were just animals."

Afterward, the men appeared to want to be filmed, with one going over to a bus and asking people to take photos of him as if he wanted to be on TV.

A man who asked not to be identified told police that he was on his way to a job interview when he came up on the scene and started filming it.

Then, a man with a meat cleaver and knife in his bloody hands "came straight to me (and) said, ‘No, no, no, it’s cool. I just want to talk to you.’"

The man, who had a London accent, was calm.

The suspect even apologized to women who had witnessed the attack, but then quickly added "in our lands our women have to see the same."

"You people will never be safe," he said.

"Remove your government. They don’t care about you. You think David Cameron is going to get caught in the street when we start busting our guns?"

"Get rid of them. Tell them to bring our troops back so we can all live in peace."