The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Man held in attacks that killed 3 and wounded 3
A man was arrested early Tuesday on suspicion of murder after three people, including two students, were found dead in the city of Nottingham, in central England. The arrest followed a series of attacks Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain called a “shocking incident.”
Police said they were first alerted just after 4 a.m. about two people who had been “stabbed in the street and were unresponsive.” These two people would later be identified as 19-year-old students at the University of Nottingham.
Police officers were then called to a nearby street in the city center, where three other people were found wounded after a driver attempted to run them over with a van, according to a statement by the Nottinghamshire Police. Soon after, the body of a man in his 50s who had been killed with a knife was found in a third street. Police said Tuesday that they believe the van belonged to that man and that it had been stolen from him. A 31-year-old man was arrested in connection with the deaths. The three other injured people, including one man who was in critical condition, were receiving treatment in a hospital, police said. Police described them only as “members of the public.”
“This is a tragic series of events which has led to the lives of three innocent people being taken,” Chief Constable Kate Meynell of the Nottinghamshire Police said in the statement. She said authorities were “keeping an open mind” as they gathered evidence to determine a motive behind the attack.
“Currently, we do not believe there is anyone else involved in this incident,” the
chief constable said.
The University of Nottingham, in a statement, confirmed the “sudden and unexpected” deaths of two of its students. “We are shocked and devastated by the news and our thoughts are with those affected, their families and friends,” it said.
Several main roads were closed for the investigation all day and Nottingham’s tram service had been partly suspended.
Authorities gave no indication whether the alarming succession of violence was connected to terrorism, with police saying only that they were working with a team of detectives and counterterrorism police to “establish the facts” in an ongoing investigation still in its “early stages.”
“The police must be given the time to undertake their work,” Sunak wrote in a Twitter post expressing his condolences for the families of the victims.
Nottingham, a two-hour train ride north of London, is a city of more than 300,000 people at the center of an urban area of over 750,000.
A vigil was held in Nottingham on Tuesday evening. And condolences came from as far a field as France, with President Emmanuel Macron writing on Twitter, “Our thoughts go to the victims of the tragic events in Nottingham, the injured, the families. We share the grief of our British friends and stand by their side.”