Kiwi on the London tube: ‘ It got real crazy, quick’
Authorities are treating explosion that injured 18 passengers on train during rush hour as an act of terrorism
Terrified commuters had to “run for their lives” after an explosion on a London Underground train last night.
People fled in panic after a “fireball” reportedly left several passengers with facial burns on the packed rush- hour train in Parsons Green, southwest London.
Police said they were treating the incident as a terror attack.
Kiwi builder Brian Moore was on the District Line train on his way to work when it lurched to a halt.
“Everyone just panicked. I just saw a stampede of people running for their lives . . . chaos.”
Moore said “it got real crazy, real quick . . . I’ve never seen anything like it. There was alarms and yelling and screaming.”
The 32- year- old from Napier, who lives in Putney, said he didn’t hear the explosion itself because he had been wearing headphones.
Armed police, paramedics and firefighters were all said to be at the station within five minutes of the explosion, about 8.20am local time.
Pictures from the train appeared to show a burning plastic bucket stashed in a Lidl carrier bag. A number of wires were protruding out of the top.
A journalist at the scene said a police officer told her there was a second unexploded device being tackled by the bomb squad.
The Metro newspaper reported that passengers had suffered facial burns and others had been hurt in the stampede.
“I was on the second carriage from the back. I just heard a kind of whoosh. I looked up and saw the whole carriage engulfed in flames making its way towards me,” a man who was on the train told Reuters.
Another witness saw a woman being carried off on a stretcher.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said there was no indication last night of any New Zealanders being injured.
bucket wrapped in an insulated bag ignited and set off a fireball in a packed London subway train, sending commuters stampeding in panic at the height of rush hour.
Police last night said they were investigating it as a terrorist attack and that a manhunt was under way.
Photos taken inside a District Line train show a white plastic bucket inside a foil- lined shopping bag. Flames and what appear to be wires emerge from the top. London ambulance service said they had sent multiple crews to the Parsons Green station and 18 people were hospitalised, though none had life- threatening injuries. Police advised people to avoid the area in southwest London.
“There was out of the corner of my eye a massive flash of flames that went up the side of the train,” eyewitness Chris Wildish told Sky News, then “an acrid chemical smell”.
Another commuter, Richard Aylmer- Hall, said he saw several people injured, apparently trampled as they fled what he described as a packed train. Wildish said many of those on board were schoolchildren, who were knocked around as the crowd surged away from the fireball.
At capacity, the train could hold more than 800 people.
“I saw crying women, there was lots of shouting and screaming, there was a bit of a crush on the stairs going down to the streets,” said AylmerHall.
Aerial footage later showed other commuters being evacuated along the elevated track.
The ambulance service said multiple crews had been dispatched to the above- ground subway station.
London’s Metropolitan Police said counterterrorism investigators were at the Parsons Green station but it was “too early to confirm the cause of the fire, which will be subject to the investigation that is now under way by the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command”.
The underground operator said services had been cut along the line.
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said people should “keep calm and go about their normal lives”.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan said the city “utterly condemns the hideous individuals who attempt to use terror to harm us and destroy our way of life”.
London has been targeted by attackers several times this year, with vehicle attacks near Parliament, on London Bridge and near a mosque in Finsbury Park in north London.
The London Underground itself has been targeted several times in the past, notably in July 2005, when suicide bombers blew themselves up on three subway trains and a bus, killing 52 people and themselves. Four more bombers tried a similar attack t wo weeks later, but their devices failed to fully explode.
Last year Damon Smith, a student with an interest in weapons and Islamic extremism, left a knapsack filled with explosives and ball bearings on a London subway train. It failed to explode.
In its recent Inspire magazine, alQaeda urged supporters to target trains.
Separately, French counterterrorism authorities were investigating an attempted knife attack on a soldier patrolling a large Paris subway interchange.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said counterterrorism investigators have opened a probe into yesterday’s incident at the Chatelet station in central Paris, based on preliminary examination of the attacker’s background.
The knife- wielding assailant tried to attack a soldier with a special military force assigned to protect prominent sites following deadly Islamic extremist attacks. He was quickly arrested and no one was hurt.
The missile was launched from the Sunan airfield just north of Pyongyang about 6.30am ( 9.30am NZT) local time, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said. It flew 3700km over 17 minutes, passing over Hokkaido and landing some 1900km to the east in the Pacific Ocean.
The launch immediately triggered emergency alerts in Japan, with text messages and loud speakers telling residents beneath the missile’s potential flight path to seek shelter.
The Japanese Government warned people not to approach any debris or other suspicious- looking material, a reflection of the fact that North Korean missiles sometimes break up in flight.
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, condemned the latest launch in “the strongest terms
possible” and reiterated that Japan would “not tolerate” North Korea’s actions. But Japan did not try to shoot down the missile.
South Korea, however, immediately fired one of its Hyunmoo- II missiles 250km into the sea — the same distance it would have had to travel to reach the Sunan airfield.
In Washington, the White House said President Donald Trump was briefed on the latest North Korean missile launch by his chief of staff, John Kelly.
The missile did not pose a threat to North America or to the US territory of Guam, the U. S. Pacific Command said. The Pacific island of Guam is home to large US Air Force and Navy bases and was the target of North Korea’s recent rhetorical threats.
Yesterday’s launch appeared similar to the previous launch, on August 29. On that day, North Korea fired a Hwasong- 12 — an intermediate- range ballistic missile technically capable of flying 5000km, enough to reach Guam — from the Sunan airfield. But it also flew to the east, over Hokkaido and into the Pacific Ocean, rather than on a southward path toward Guam.
Analysts said that after testing its missiles by firing them straight up and having them crash into the sea between the Korean Peninsula and Japan, North Korea was apparently testing its missiles’ flight on a normal trajectory without crossing a “red line” of aiming at the United States.
On Thursday, a North Korean state agency had issued an alarming threat to what it offensively called the “wicked Japs”. “The four islands of the [ Japanese] archipelago should be sunken into the sea by [ our] nuclear bomb,” a spokesman for the Korea Asia- Pacific Peace Committee said in a statement carried by the official news agency. Hokkaido i s the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands. “Japan is no longer needed to exist near us,” the committee spokesman said.
This is the first missile launch since North Korea conducted a huge nuclear test on September 3, which analysts say appeared to live up to Pyongyang’s claim that the device that was exploded was a hydrogen bomb, exponentially more powerful than a normal atomic device.
That test, combined with the rapid pace of missile launches and North Korea’s stated goal of wanting to be able to strike the mainland United States with a nuclear- tipped missile, has caused alarm around the world.
The UN Security Council imposed its toughest- ever sanctions against North Korea on Tuesday, setting limits on North Korea’s oil imports and banning its textile exports.
But the new sanctions were a compromise. The US had to tone down its demands, which included a total oil embargo and a global travel ban on leader Kim Jong Un, in order to win the support of China and Russia.
Tillerson’s statement reflected the Trump Administration’s frustration with the reluctance of Beijing and Moscow to inflict real pain on Pyongyang.
The North Korean statement that hit out at Japan also, meanwhile, reflected Pyongyang’s anger at what it called the “heinous sanctions resolution”. The North Korean people and military wanted “the Yankees, chief culprit in cooking up the ‘ sanctions resolution’, [ to] be beaten to death as a stick is fit for a rabid dog,” the statement said.
The Japanese Government estimates that the force of the September 3 nuclear test was 160 kilotons — more than 10 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — but some analysts have said its yield could have been as much as 250 kilotons.