London police: ‘Major incident’ causes casualties near mosque
Vehicle hits pedestrians near Muslim center, revives terror fears; 1 arrested.
LONDON — A vehicle drove into pedestrians early Monday morning in London, reviving anxieties in the British capital, which has endured two recent terrorist attacks involving vehicles.
The Metropolitan Police called the Monday event “a major incident” and said a number of casual
ties were being treated at the scene. At least seven or eight people were injured, according to eyewitnesses.
One person has been arrested. The incident on Monday, which the police were called to at 12:20 a.m., occurred on Seven Sisters Road in Finsbury Park, a neighborhood where many immigrants live.
Witnesses on the scene, as well as numerous
accounts on social media, said the pedestrians were hit outside the Finsbury Park Mosque or the close-by Muslim Welfare House, a community center.
“We have been informed that a van has run over worshipers as they left #FinsburyPark Mosque,” the Muslim Council of Britain said on Twitter. “Our prayers are with the victims.”
“Our prayers and thoughts with those injured outside Muslim Welfare House in Seven Sisters road hit by a van mounting pavement,” MEND, a nonprofit organization that fights Islamophobia and encourages British Muslims to get more involved in media and politics, wrote on Twitter.
A witness, Mahroof Mohammed, was having his evening tea at a Somalian restaurant on Seven Sisters Road when he heard people running.
He went outside and saw several injured people. “There were seven or eight, three of them were bleeding badly,” Mr. Mohammed said. “They were all leaving the mosque when they got hit by the van.”
Mr. Mohammed said that most of the victims he saw were male, but he also saw one old woman injured.
“An old man was severely injured,” his walking stick right next to him, Mr. Mohammed, a local businessman, said. “His family said he passed away.”
Boubou Sougou, 23, was leaving the gym on the intersection of Seven Sisters and Isledon Road when he saw people bleeding in the parking lot of the Finsbury Park Mosque.
“There were around five people that were injured, one old man was severely injured,” Sougou said.
“His family had gathered around him, trying to resuscitate him.”
On social media, witnesses said they believed the victims had been performing Tarawih, the evening prayers performed by Sunni Muslims at night in the Islamic month of Ramadan.
The police arrived about 15 to 20 minutes after the incident, Mohammed said. “It was three local men that were holding the man from the van until police came and put him inside the van,” he said.
Mohammed said that the man was a white male, whose arms were heavily tattooed. He was not saying anything while he was held.
Sougou added: “I saw the attacker attempting to run away but people from the mosque held him back,” he said.
“Some of them wanted to beat him up, but were stopped by the ones that were holding him until the police came.”
The Finsbury Park Mosque opened in 1994 and became a hotbed of Islamist militants, including Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman convicted of conspiring to kill Americans as part of the Sept. 11 attacks, and Richard C. Reid, who attempted to down an American jetliner in late 2001 with explosives packed in his shoes.
In 2015, the mosque’s former imam, Mostafa Kamel Mostafa, was sentenced to life in prison in Federal District Court in Manhattan on 11 terrorism-related charges.