Melbourne stabbing spree leaves two dead

Aknife-wielding man was fatally shot by the police in Melbourne yesterday after he stabbed three people, killing one, in what the authorities described as a terrorist attack.

Witnesses said the man emerged from a vehicle, which then burst into flames, shortly after 4pm.

Police said there were gas cylinders in the vehicle. The man then began to attack pedestrians on Bourke Street, a busy shopping strip in Melbourne’s city centre.

When officers arrived at the scene, they were confronted with the man brandishing a bloody knife. A video of the confrontation, circulated on social media, shows a civilian bystander trying to help the police by repeatedly pushing a shopping cart at the man.

“Someone screamed ... I turned around and saw the car on fire,” said Meegan May, a passenger on a tram that passed the scene.

Officers ultimately shot the man in the chest and arrested him. The man, whose identity has not been disclosed, was taken to a hospital, where he died about 30 minutes later, the police said.

‘Terror incident’

“We are treating this as a terrorism incident,” Graham Ashton, Chief Commissioner of the Victoria Police, at a news conference. He said the Somaliborn man had been known to the police.

The names and ages of the victims, who were all men, have not yet been released.

Knives are the weapon most commonly used in homicides in Australia, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a government agency. In 2015, 30 per cent of all murders in Australia involved knives, as did 26 per cent of attempted murders.

The incident occurred less than two years after an attack on the same street, in which a man barrelled his car into a crowd, killing six pedestrians and injuring at least 20 others. His trial is underway this week.