Vehicle hits pedestrians near mosque

LONDON — A vehicle struck pedestrians outside a mosque in northern London early Monday, causing several casualties, police said. One person was arrested.

The Muslim Council tweeted that worshippers were struck by a van as they were leaving prayers at the

Finsbury Park mosque on Seven Sisters Road at 12:20 a.m. Monday London time.

The Finsbury Park mosque was associated with extremist ideology for several years after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States but was shut down and reorganized. It has not been associated with radical views for more than a decade.

The neighborhood has two mosques, and several hundred worshippers would have been in the area after attending prayers as part of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

London police declared the crash a major incident and closed the area to normal traffic.

The London Ambulance Service said the injured were being taken to hospitals; witnesses reported seeing police give emergency medical treatment to at least one of the injured.

The Muslim Council said its prayers are with the victims.

Britain’s terrorist alert has been set at “severe,” meaning that an attack is highly likely.

On June 3, a van carrying three Muslim extremists drove into pedestrians on London Bridge before they launched a knife attack in nearby Borough Market. Eight people were killed before the men were shot to death by police.

Manchester, England, was hit by a severe attack in May when a bomber killed more than 20 people at an Ariana Grande concert.

On March 22, a 52-year-old Briton rammed a car into a crowd of pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, fatally injuring four of them, and then stabbed a police officer to death before he was gunned down by police.

The Finsbury Park Mosque, which opened in 1994, became a hotbed of Islamist militants, attracting Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman convicted in the United States of conspiring to kill Americans as part of the Sept. 11 attacks, and Richard C. Reid, a British man who attempted to down a U.S. jetliner in December 2001 with explosives packed in his shoes.

In 2015, the mosque’s former imam, Mostafa Kamel Mostafa, was sentenced to life in prison in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on 11 terrorism-related charges.

The mosque was raided by authorities in January 2003.

In February 2005, it was completely reconstituted — “run by a new board of trustees with a new management team, new imams, a new name and new ethos,” according to its website.

Amid the furor of candidate Donald Trump’s presidential-campaign proposal for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn invited Trump to visit the Finsbury Park mosque to show him how “multicultural, multifaith” Britain works.

Five stories tall, with enough space for 1,800 worshippers, it is a major house of worship for North London in an area known for being home to a large immigrant population.