Brits turn to self-defence after attacks

London, June 12: Worried Britons are increasingly taking up self-defence classes with a spike in the number of people signing up for them after the country was hit by three terrorist attacks within three months.

One school teaching self-defence was quoted by The Sunday Times as saying that it had a tenfold spike in inquiries in the immediate aftermath of last weekend’s terrorist attack on London Bridge in which three terrorists drove a van into pedestrians and then went on a stabbing spree, killing eight persons before being shot dead.

Another school said its waiting lists were “backing up” as it struggled to recruit sufficient instructors to cope with the demand.

Reece Coker, chief instructor at the Buckinghamshire-based Combat Academy UK, was quoted as saying that, “With bombings or shootings, people tend to think that there’s nothing much they could do.”

Worried Britons are taking up self-defence classes with a spike in the number of people signing up for them

Combat Academy UK said number of inquiries had jumped by 70%

One school said that it saw a huge jump in inquiries after the London Bridge attack

“But with the style of attack that we saw at London Bridge, killers roaming the streets with knives, there is a sense, rightly, that there is,” he said. The company said the number of inquiries had jumped by 70 per cent. John Aldcroft, head of the British Academy of Krav Maga, a type of selfdefence, said, “The number of people signing up for our trial classes rose ten-fold.”