Eyewitness video has emerged from Manchester's Arndale Shopping Centre of a stabbing victim asking a police officer if the knife was real before she starts to sob.

Earlier today (October 11) a man attacked multiple people at random with a knife at the city shopping centre.

"Was it a real knife?" a woman in a brown trench coat asks a policeman inside a branch of the shoe shop Office.

Filmer Freddie Houlder, a businessman from the West Midlands visiting his girlfriend in Manchester for the weekend, later told Newsflare that he believes the woman's thick coat helped save her life.

He then explains how he was 30 seconds away from possibly getting stabbed himself.

"This is scary as sh*t," he says in a selfie video.

"So apparently they’ve caught the guy. There are a load of curtains back there with a potential body, I hope they are OK.

"I'm assuming this is being treated as a terror attack but f**king hell!
Like 30 seconds [earlier] if I had have left the shop, he ran right past the shop and tried to stab a woman who was in the shop with us, which is nuts."

Video also shows police officers sprinting through the Arndale after a man attacked multiple people at random with a knife.

Greater Manchester Police have confirmed that four people have been injured, including a man in his 50s, a 19-year-old woman and another woman.

Aftermath of Manchester attack

Freddie Houlder, visiting McR for the weekend, from the West Midlands

Office