22 killed 59 injured
Twenty-two people, including an eight-year-old girl, have been killed and 59 were injured in a suicide bombing at Manchester Arena, at the end of a concert by US singer Ariana Grande.
A man set off a homemade bomb in the foyer at 22:33 BST on Monday…
Armed police have arrested a 23-year-old man in Chorlton, south Manchester, in connection with the attack.
Mancunians did what they could to help:
As hundreds of people fled Manchester Arena following the explosion, taxi drivers began taking people to safety.
Driver AJ Singh said he tried to help wherever he could.
“I’ve had people who needed to find loved ones. I’ve dropped them off to the hospital. They’ve not had any money, they’ve been stranded,” he told Channel 4 News.
“We should come out and show whoever’s done this that it doesn’t matter because Manchester, we’re glue and we stick together when it counts.”
Sam Arshad, from StreetCars Manchester asked his drivers to give free rides to anyone stranded after the Ariana Grande concert.
“The audience was a very young audience, and there were a lot of people there without their parents,” he told the BBC.
“And it’s then that people were requesting taxis but they didn’t have money.
“It was at that point that I made the decision that money isn’t everything in life and we’re part of Manchester and we need to do our part to make sure these people get home safe and sound.”
…
As news of the attack spread, locals soon began offering spare rooms on social media, under the hashtag #RoomforManchester.
Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham tweeted: “If you are stranded in the area you can also follow #RoomForManchester where hotels and local people of our great city are offering refuge.”
There’s not much you can say, is there.
The response from locals does look really good. There are reports of people offering lifts and beds. I’ve seen footage of people in dressing gowns and slippers bringing bottles of water and flasks of tea for people who can’t get to wherever they need to be. Others have brought food for police officers guarding the perimeter.
Of course, there have also been con artists on social media trying to exploit what happened for their own immediate ends.
And more worryingly there are comments on familiar websites about how people of certain ethnic origins should be punished for the actions of whoever set off the bomb, apparently regardless of who it was or why.
The immediate, human response, though: the people turning out in their dressing gowns because they realise people can’t get to their hotels and might be thirsty. The people offering lifts and beds and warm places to sit while they contact someone to pick them up.
That – as far as I can tell – happened.
Yes. I saw Tracy King on Twitter offering a bed and/or cups of tea last night.
People do this. Shits though we are, we do try to help in emergencies. It never fails to move me like nothing else. The movie Sully was on tv a week or two ago and I watched the first part of it because I’d read up on the responses at the time and wanted to see them re-enacted, in particular the captain and crew of the Hoboken ferry who raced over to rescue. I ended up dehydrated.
I missed that Tracy had done that but I’m not at all surprised.
George Monbiot in The Guardian: Don’t let psychopathic murderers suppress our common humanity.
HHO @ 4. I totally agree. It’s also a very hard stance to feel comfortable with and I’ve found it difficult to get people to buy into. Both the terrorists and the fearful authoritarians are busy undermining the very things about our culture we value. There is a terrible irony that the ‘strong’ authoritarians are actually doing a significant portion of the terrorists work for them by dismantling our own civil society. It really isn’t sustainable.