A marauding attack
Four people, including an armed police officer and a man believed to be the attacker, have died in a terrorist incident near the UK’s Houses of Parliament, Scotland Yard has said.
A woman was among several pedestrians struck by a car on Westminster bridge, before it crashed into railings.
The officer was stabbed in the Houses of Parliament by an attacker, who was shot by police.
At least 20 people were injured, including three other officers.
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The French Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said three French school pupils were among the injured and offered “solidarity with our British friends, and full support” for the wounded students and their families.
The Port of London Authority said a woman has been pulled alive from the River Thames near the bridge and was being treated for serious injuries.
It’s becoming familiar. One lonewolf drives a vehicle into a crowd and then if he’s still alive he attempts to pick off individuals. Dominic Casciani analyzes it:
The incident outside Westminster is exactly the kind of scenario that security chiefs have been planning for.
It looks like the type of attack jihadis have wanted to carry out in Britain – namely attacking people with a vehicle and taking on the security forces with knives.
In the security services’ jargon this is known as a “marauding attack” and is the hardest type of terrorist incident to predict and defend against. That means casualties, as we have seen in Nice and elsewhere, are inevitable.
The casualties are few in number, but people freak out anyway, because humans are bad at overall risk assessment.
This isn’t going to make things any better.
The attacker has been confirmed as a former ‘right-hand man’ (no pun intended) of Abu Hamza and is a known Islamic extremist who has served prison time.
Has das Trump started tweeting yet?
Further to the above comment, it has just been announced that the attacker may have been mis-identified, the man originally named is now thought to actually be in prison.
Announced where, by whom?
Sorry, should be clearer! I was watching Channel 4 News, the report regarding the i.d. came in at about 7.30.
For the sake of my sanity I’m putting the horror of this to one side for the moment to process later. As a technical discussion, will self driving cars and/or collision avoidance systems render this (vehicular) type of attack impossible in the future? Will this persuade governments to legislate in this direction in the name of safety, or will they prefer to just have bigger and bigger paramilitary budgets and surveillance?
Rob, I think it will be a long while before the public trust self-driving cars enough not to demand a manual override.