British police staged more raids Monday and detained an undisclosed number of suspects in connection with the weekend London Bridge attack in the heart of the British capital.
British police staged more raids Monday and detained an undisclosed number of suspects in connection with the weekend London Bridge attack in the heart of the British capital that left seven people dead and scores hurt.
Meanwhile, the attack – carried out by a trio of assailants who used a rented van to ram pedestrians on the bridge, then jumped out with long knives and slashed bar and restaurant patrons in an adjoining nightlife district – moved to the forefront of this week’s general elections.
Prime Minister Theresa May, whose Conservatives had initially held a large lead in opinion polls, appeared to be losing ground to the left-leaning Labor Party. Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn said May should resign over police cuts she presided over as Home Secretary, the country’s top security post that May had held for six years before becoming prime minister last year.
Corbyn also vehemently denounced a series of tweets by President Trump in which the U. S. president mischaracterized comments by London’s Muslim mayor and used the attack to press for a presidential travel ban now being weighed by the Supreme Court. May has been more measured, defending Mayor Sadiq Khan but not directly criticizing Trump.
Khan had told Londoners that they would be seeing more police on the streets in response to the terror threat, but there was “no reason to be alarmed” by this. “We are the safest global city in the world, ” he added.
Trump jumped on Khan’s reassurances, tweeting Sunday: “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!’ ”
On Monday, after Islamic State militants claimed responsibility for the attack, Khan condemned the “poisonous” ideology that he said underpinned the rampage, saying it had no place in Islam. The identities of the assailants have not yet been disclosed for fear of compromising the investigation, though police said they know their names.
Trump followed up with another tweet, lashing out at reports that he had mischaracterized Khan’s earlier statement.
Monday was the first workday since the Saturday night rampage, and while the bridge and parts of surrounding areas remained blocked off, transport links in the busy zone were reopening, though one major Tube station was still closed. Many peoples’ commute took them on foot past police barricades, with street corners heaped with bouquets of flowers, stuffed animals and handwritten notes.
Debate in Britain grew, meanwhile, about the country’s longstanding practice of most police officers going unarmed. Police had shot dead the attackers, who were wearing fake suicide vests, eight minutes after the first distress call, wounding one civilian in the process. But one of the nearly 50 people injured was an officer who had confronted the attackers wielding only a baton.
The police raids have been concentrated in east London, where a dozen people had been detained on Sunday. One was released but the rest remained in custody.
Police said little about the additional arrests in the same general part of the city, other than to confirm that more raids had taken place early Monday. Like May, senior police officials described a recent spate of terror attacks – the bridge rampage was the third major strike in three months – as posing an “unprecedented” threat.
“We in this country have faced a terrorist threat throughout my life, ” Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick told reporters on Monday. “It changed and morphed, and we will change and adapt to what appears to be a new reality for us.”
Londoners, even while mourning, expressed continuing determination to avoid giving in to the kind of fear the attackers had sought to sow. A photograph of a man carefully balancing his mug of beer as he walked amid those fleeing the attack on Saturday night went viral online, inspiring thousands of memes and becoming for many a symbol of calm resistance in the face of terror.
“I think that the vast majority of the public are keen to promote a united view and a ‘stiff upper lip’ in a typically British manner, so in many ways the attacks have galvanized the British public, ” said Matthew Flinders, a political scientist at Sheffield University. “And I think this is reflected in the manner in which the political parties have remained united and have not been tempted to engage in partisan blame games around the attacks. “
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Special correspondent Kirschbaum reported from London and Times staff writer King from Washington.
