Highlights:
- Ten people injured in stabbing on train from Doncaster to London
- Nine victims reported to be in critical condition
- Two suspects arrested; counter-terrorism police assisting
- Prime Minister Keir Starmer calls incident “deeply concerning”
POLICE are investigating a mass stabbing on a London-bound train that left 10 people injured, including nine in critical condition. Two people were arrested following the incident.
The attack took place on Saturday evening on a train travelling from Doncaster, in northern England, to King’s Cross station in London. The train was forced to stop at Huntingdon station in Cambridgeshire after the stabbing.
Police said 10 people were taken to hospital, with nine “believed to have suffered life-threatening injuries”. Counter-terrorism officers are assisting with the investigation, though the motive and identities of the suspects are not yet known.
AFP journalists reported seeing police and forensic teams working through the night at the station, some wearing white overalls.
Witness Olly Foster told the BBC that he heard passengers shouting, “run, run, there’s a guy literally stabbing everyone,” and initially thought it was a Halloween prank. “But then people started pushing through the carriage,” he said, adding that his hand was “covered in blood” from the chair he had been leaning on.
Foster said he saw an older man block the attacker from stabbing a younger girl and that the incident “felt like forever” though it lasted only a few minutes.
Other witnesses told Sky News they saw a man holding a large knife on the platform after the train stopped. They said the man was later tasered and restrained by police.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer described the incident as “deeply concerning”. London North Eastern Railway, which operates the route, urged passengers not to travel on Sunday, warning that services could be cancelled at short notice.
Knife crime in England and Wales has risen since 2011, according to government data. Despite strict gun control laws, Starmer has called the problem a “national crisis”, and his government has taken steps to reduce knife-related offences.
The interior ministry said on Wednesday that nearly 60,000 blades have been “seized or surrendered” as part of efforts to halve knife crime within the next decade.
At the start of October, two people were killed — one by misdirected police gunfire — and others wounded in a stabbing attack at a synagogue in Manchester. The incident deeply affected the local Jewish community.
Last Thursday, a man appeared in a London court charged with murder after another daylight stabbing that left one dead and two injured.
Defence minister John Healey said on Sunday that initial findings indicated the latest train attack was “an isolated attack”. “The early assessment is that this was an isolated incident, an isolated attack,” he told Sky News.
(With inputs from agencies)
