Terror alert level raised after taxi blast at hospital
LONDON — British authorities raised the country’s threat level to its second-highest rung on Monday, after police said a blast in a taxi outside a Liverpool hospital was caused by a homemade bomb.
Investigators said they were treating Sunday’s explosion — which killed the suspected bombmaker and injured the cab driver — as a terrorist incident, but that the motive was unclear.
Counterterrorism police named the dead man as Emad Al Swealmeen, 32. They did not give further details, though Britain’s Press Association news agency and other media reported that he had not been on the radar of the security services.
The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre raised the U.K. threat level from substantial — meaning an attack is likely — to severe, meaning it is highly likely, following the U.K.’s second fatal incident in a month. Conservative lawmaker David Amess was stabbed to death in October in what police said was an act of terrorism.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned the “sickening attack” at Liverpool Women’s Hospital and told reporters that the British people “will never be cowed by terrorism.”
The male passenger in a taxi was killed and the driver injured when a blast ripped through the vehicle as it pulled up outside the hospital. Russ Jackson, the head of Counterterrorism Policing in northwestern England, said the explosion was caused by “the ignition of an explosive device” that was brought into the vehicle by the passenger.
Three men in their 20s were arrested elsewhere in the city Sunday under the Terrorism Act and a fourth was detained on Monday. All are believed to be “associates” of the dead passenger, police said.
Suspicions about a motive for the explosion have been aroused by the timing — just before 11 a.m. on Remembrance Sunday, the moment when people across Britain hold services in memory of those killed in wars. Jackson said the passenger had been picked up by the cab a 10-minute drive away and asked to be taken to the hospital. The driver, named by local media as David Perry, managed to escape from the car. He was treated in the hospital and released.
Police said officers had searched two addresses in the city linked to the passenger and found “significant items” at one of them. Officers performed a controlled explosion “as a precaution” as part of the investigation.
Liverpool Mayor Joanne Anderson said the taxi driver had locked the doors of his cab so the passenger couldn’t leave. “The taxi driver, in his heroic efforts, has managed to divert what could have been an absolutely awful disaster at the hospital,” Anderson told the BBC.