A knife attacker slashed a man at an east London metro station, reportedly screaming “this is for Syria,” in what police described as a terrorist incident, prompting a senior minister to urge Britons on Sunday not to be intimidated by the attack.
A pool of blood near the ticket barriers at the Leytonstone Underground station, about 10km east of central London, could be seen in footage posted on Twitter that also showed the suspect confronting police on Saturday evening.
Police said the man, believed to be aged 29, had also threatened other bystanders. One man, thought to be 56 years old, suffered serious but not life-threatening injuries and was in a stable condition at a London hospital. A second victim suffered minor injuries.
“I am treating this as a terrorist incident,” Richard Walton, who leads the Counter Terrorism Command at London’s Metropolitan Police, said in a statement. The man was arrested after police used a Taser to subdue him.
Detectives were searching a residential address in east London, police said on Sunday.
An eyewitness quoted by The Guardian and other British newspapers said the attacker appeared to claim that he was retaliating for Western air strikes on jihadist militants in Syria. Police declined to comment on those reports and it was not immediately possible to verify them independently.
Britain is on its second-highest security alert level of “severe,” meaning a militant attack is considered highly likely - though not imminent - mainly because of the threat posed by Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq.
Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith said whatever the circumstances, Britons must not let the Leytonstone incident affect their behaviour.
“We cannot let these sort of people, terrorists et cetera, actually dominate our space,” he told the BBC. “The way we defeat them at the end of the day is with our values, our freedom of expression, our freedom of belief ... our ability to take our children, our families out at Christmas. None of that must be curtailed.”
An eyewitness told the Guardian the knife attacker shouted “This is what happens when you f*** with mother Syria, all of your blood will be spilled.”
Britain’s worst militant attack was in July 2005, when 52 people were killed by suicide bombs on underground trains and a bus.