The London Bridge attack: nine minutes of hell
Nine minutes. That was all it took for three terrorists to bring carnage to the streets of London on Saturday night, said Robert Mendick in The Daily Telegraph. The horror began to unfold at around 10.07pm, when they drove a rented van at speed across London Bridge, weaving from side to side to hit as many pedestrians as possible. Witnesses spoke of “bodies everywhere”, and people screaming in terror. “It’s happening,” shouted one woman, as she raced for cover. Seconds later, the van careered to a halt. The three men burst out, carrying knives with 12-inch blades, and began attacking their victims as they lay on the ground. Then they ran towards Borough Market, and – running into its crowded bars and restaurants – began stabbing people at random.
There were countless attempts to stop them: an unarmed British Transport Police officer confronted them with only a baton, and was badly injured; a Romanian chef ran out of his bakery, and hit one of the men over the head with a crate, then ushered 20 people back in with him, and closed the shutters; in pubs and restaurants, customers and staff tried to fight off the knifemen by throwing bottles and chairs at them. But in the chaos and confusion, the killers calmly carried on. “This is for my family, this is for Islam,” they told their victims, as they pushed their blades home. The first fatality to be named was 30-year-old Canadian Christine Archibald, who’d worked in a night shelter for homeless people before moving to the UK to be with her fiancé, in whose arms she died on London Bridge. In a statement, her family said she would have had “no understanding of the callous cruelty that caused her death”.
This was the sort of scenario the Met had been fearing, and preparing for, since the Mumbai attack of 2008, said The Times: terrorists running amok in a crowded area. In the roads around Borough Market, they had three attackers to find – and there were hundreds of ordinary citizens, some horrifically injured, others distressed and confused, who might stray into the line of fire. “Get down! Get down!” armed police screamed, as they swept through restaurants. They’d been trained to “locate, contain and neutralise” the threat, and they did. Within eight minutes of the first 999 call, they had shot all three killers dead. Islamic State – which had just urged its supporters to use the holy month of Ramadan to attack infidels in “their homes, their markets, their roads and their forums” – was quick to claim responsibility for the atrocity.
The police response was exemplary. Yet once again, there will be questions about why the attack was able to happen in the first place. One of the trio, Pakistanborn Khuram Butt, 27, a father of two from Barking, east London, was known to Scotland Yard and MI5, and had actually been seen holding an Islamic State flag in the Channel 4 documentary The Jihadis Next Door. But there are thousands of suspected extremists in this country, said Richard Walton in The Daily Telegraph. The Met now has 2,000 specialist officers working on Islamist terrorism in London alone. We can’t “arrest our way out” of this crisis. That MI5 has foiled five attacks since 22 March illustrates the sheer scale of the task, said the Daily Mail – a task which is made much harder by extremists launching “impromptu attacks” that require very little planning. So while we should extend police powers, to detain and monitor suspects, we must also insist that Muslim families, many of whom have been allowed to insulate themselves from British life, do their duty, and
root out the radicals in their midst.
You can’t demonise a community and then expect it to cooperate, said Tariq Ramadan in The Guardian. Muslims have a right to protest against UK foreign policy, say, without being targeted by MI5. Stigmatising Muslims will only further alienate the disaffected, and play into the hands of Islamophobes. Besides, homegrown terrorists are often divorced from their communities (Butt had been expelled by his mosque) and radicalised online, by preachers based abroad. Yet urging social media firms to remove extremist content isn’t a solution either, said the FT. Yes, the likes of Facebook could do more, but 400 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every minute. They can’t monitor it all. Besides, when they do crack down, the extremists simply move to encrypted services. This is a battle that will have to be fought on many fronts, said Juliet Samuel in The Daily Telegraph. But we have faced more severe challenges in the past: our history is “rich with examples of fanaticism succumbing to moderation, rational debate winning arguments, and peril giving way, in turn, to peace. Progress isn’t easy, or automatic, and it doesn’t come from denying a problem.” But we can overcome.
“MI5 has foiled five attacks since 22 March, illustrating the sheer scale of the task”