2 People Stabbed in London’s Leicester Square
Two people were stabbed in London’s Leicester Square, a tourist hot spot, on Monday, the police said.
The victims, an 11-year-old girl and a 34-year-old woman, were taken to a hospital, Westminster police said in a post on social media. In a later update, the police said that the girl would require hospital treatment but that her injuries were not life threatening and that the woman suffered more minor injuries.
The police added that “there is no suggestion that the incident is terror-related.”
A man was arrested and was in custody, and the police said they did not believe there were any additional suspects.
The episode came exactly two weeks after a deadly knife attack in Southport, near Liverpool, that led to the death of three young girls and injured eight other children and two adults. In the days after the stabbings in Southport, false information about the identity of the attacker, including that he was an undocumented migrant, spread rapidly online and ignited a series of violent riots around Britain.
In Leicester Square, an area in front of a shop called TWG Tea was cordoned off by blue and white police tape at 1:30 p.m., with a handful of police officers positioned at the scene. There were visible blood stains and a discarded baseball cap in the cordoned-off zone.
A man working as security in the tea shop said he had witnessed the attack and intervened after a young girl and a woman he believed to be her mother were injured. Police officers then whisked the witness away for further questioning.
The BBC identified the employee as a 29-year-old named Abdullah. He told the BBC and the Press Association news agency that he had tackled the attacker, kicking the knife away before he and a few others held the man down until the police arrived.
Two hours after the attack, hundreds of tourists continued to mill about the square. Shoppers at the Lego and M&M’s stores, which both frequently have long lines of people waiting to enter, craned their necks to see what was happening as a helicopter circled overhead.
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