Just after midnight in the early hours of Monday morning, a man in a van mounted a sidewalk near a North London mosque and plowed through pedestrians, leaving one person dead and injuring eight others.
“He went into the bus lane and took a sharp left to run people over. He did it on purpose,” one eyewitness told Sky News.
The incident occurred near Finsbury Park Mosque and has been described by Met Police as a terrorist attack.
“This was quite clearly an attack on Muslims who looked like they were probably Muslims and they were coming from a prayer meeting,” Met Commissioner Cressida Dick told media at the scene. “We treat this as a terrorist attack. We in the Met are as shocked as anybody in this local community or across the country.”
“I saw 6 or 7 people on the floor” – Witness describes the moment a white van hit people leaving a mosque ‘on purpose’ in Finsbury Park pic.twitter.com/OhWvLctek2
— Sky News (@SkyNews) June 19, 2017
The man responsible has since been identified as Darren Osborne, 47, a father of four, from Cardiff, in the U.K.
He reportedly shouted, “I want to kill all Muslims” before mounting the curb and racing his van towards a group of people huddled around an elderly man who’d collapsed prior to the incident.
“I had been walking when I saw a man on the street. People said he was sick and that he’d collapsed. After a minute I looked up and saw a van driving at high speed,” witness Abdikadar Warfa told the Press Association. “It was driving on Seven Sisters Road but instead of continuing on Seven Sisters Road it turned left and went through the people.”
Witness Abdikadar Warfa told @PA people tending to a man who had collapsed were struck by a van #FinsburyPark pic.twitter.com/k51KRBkNKx
— Alexander Britton (@adbritton) June 19, 2017
Top Comments
Jesus. I feel like I'm getting to a saturation point of tragedy, I can't absorb any more bad news. It just seems to be never ending. I can't imagine how the citizens of the UK feel at the moment.
What about Syrian children? How many Syrian children died yesterday? The world is caring about this because it's in the UK, but Syrians are dying daily.
Also, as in the word's of Sadiq Khan, terrorism is part of living in a big city.