Mother is ‘locked in mall after escalator traps her coat’

A woman claimed today she was locked inside a deserted shopping centre after security guards abandoned her when her coat got stuck in an escalator.

Marketing manager Paedra Sohrens, 44, was with her 12-year-old son Nathaneal when her £3,000 Nicole Farhi overcoat became wedged in the mechanism just before closing time at the Arcadia Centre in Ealing.

But she says two security staff mocked her when she appealed for help and then locked the doors, leaving her and her son stranded inside the mall at 8pm yesterday.

An hour later, she claimed, the guards agreed they would open the doors to let her out. But she refused to go and demanded the guards call out engineers to free the coat. They said they could not do that without a manager.

Ms Sohrens, of Shepherd's Bush, said: "The security guards said I would have to rip it [the coat] out or leave it but I didn't want to because it is an expensive coat and it was freezing outside. They were laughing at me and then just turned away and walked off.

"They locked all the doors after everyone else had gone and my son and I were left inside." She said the guards only softened their position when she told them she had called police. She said that at 11.30pm she was sent home in the freezing rain without a coat. Scotland Yard said the dispute was "not a police matter".