A paranoid schizophrenic who partially blinded a 96-year-old war veteran on a Croydon tram is terrorising girls working on Allders' perfumery counter, it has been claimed.

Sources at Allders described Stephen Gordon as a "walking timebomb" as they revealed fears he could launch an attack on someone at the North End store.

Gordon walked free from court in October after he was given a three-year supervision order for the attack on Shah Chaudury.

The 44-year-old, from Croydon, attacked the pensioner on a tram travelling between Sandilands and East Croydon on December 14 last year. Mr Chaudury lost the sight in one eye and also suffered a stroke a few months after the attack.

A source at Allders said: "Stephen Gordon has been banned from Allders for a while now. But he walks through the store all the time and heads straight for the perfumery counter and starts chatting up the girls working on there.

"The problem is by the time security are made aware, either by seeing him on camera or by getting a call from the perfumery counter, he is gone. From the moment they realise he is there it takes security a good two or three minutes to reach the counter. By that time he is gone.

"He might be mentally unbalanced but he's clever enough to know how to come in and get out without being caught by security.

"The girls are terrified, particularly in light of what he did to the elderly gentleman, and we are all really worried that he could be capable of doing something terrible. He's a walking timebomb.

"Obviously we don't agree with the court's decision to give him such a lenient sentence - if he is mentally unstable he should not be allowed to walk freely among the community.

"We are now having to deal with the fear that he could do something else. And there's not a thing we can do about it."

Gordon had tried to push past Mr Chaudury, who had been standing in the aisle of the tram leaning on his walking sticks.

As Gordon tried to walk under the elderly man's arms to get by his hat came off and he lashed out at the veteran, calling him a "bastard" before punching him in the face.

Tramlink refused to ban Gordon from the tram network following the conviction saying it would be too hard to police.