A man wielding a knife on Saturday slashed another man in an east London metro station, reportedly screaming “this is for Syria” before police used a stun gun to subdue him in what they described as a terrorist incident.
A pool of blood near the ticket barriers at the London Underground’s Leytonstone station, about 10km east of central London, could be seen in footage posted on Twitter that also showed the suspect confronting officers at just after 7pm.
Police said initial reports indicated the man, believed to be aged 29, had also threatened other bystanders. One 56-year-old man suffered serious, non-life-threatening injuries. Two other people had minor injuries, police said.
“We are treating this as a terrorist incident,” said Richard Walton, who leads the Counter Terrorism Command at London’s Metropolitan Police.
An eyewitness quoted by the Guardian and other British newspapers said the attacker appeared to claim that he was retaliating for Western attacks on Muslim militant targets in Syria.
Police declined to comment on those reports and it was not immediately possible to independently verify them.
The Leytonstone incident is likely to draw parallels with the May 2013 murder of British Army soldier Lee Rigby, who was hacked to death just south of the Thames River by two Muslim converts.
Britain is on its second-highest alert level of “severe,” meaning a militant attack is considered highly likely, mainly because of the threat posed by Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq who are encouraging supporters to attack the West.
After Islamic State militants claimed responsibility for the attacks on Paris last month that killed 130 people, British Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday last week won approval from lawmakers to bomb the extremist group in Syria.
British warplanes first bombed oil fields controlled by the Islamic State on Thursday.
Cameron said airstrikes would not increase the chances of an attack on Britain, since militants already viewed Britain as a top target with seven plots foiled over the past year.
An eyewitness to the knife attack was quoted as saying the attacker had screamed about Syria.
“I just saw a lot of people running, but I ignored it and kept walking to get my train, but suddenly what I saw, I couldn’t believe my eyes and what I saw was a guy with a knife,” the Guardian quoted an eyewitness as saying.
“As he was coming out, this is what he said: ‘This is what happens when you fuck with mother Syria, all of your blood will be spilled,’” the eyewitness was reported as saying.
Such apparently random attacks are extremely difficult to thwart, because they require relatively little planning and very basic equipment.
British security services say about two-thirds of their time is spent countering international militants, much of that connected to Syria.
Britain’s worst Muslim militant attack was in July 2005, when 52 people were killed by suicide bombs on underground trains and a bus.
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