Eight People, Including Children, Injured In Stabbing Attack In Southport, England
By
OSABUOHIEN VIVIAN ROSE
At least eight people, including children, were injured in a stabbing attack in Southport, England Monday, emergency services said. Police said they detained a 17-year-old male suspect and seized a knife.
A witness described seeing bloodied children running from a community center where a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga event for children aged about 6 to 11 was taking place. An advertisement for the event promised “a morning of Taylor Swift-themed yoga, dance and bracelet making.”
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called the attack “horrendous and deeply shocking.”
Merseyside Police said officers were called at about noon to an address in Southport, a seaside town of about 100,000 people near Liverpool. It called it a “major incident” but said there was no wider threat to the public.
Detectives were not treating the attack as terror-related, the force said.
The suspect, who has not been identified, lived in a village about 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the scene of the attack, police said.
The North West Ambulance Service said medics treated eight people with stab injuries. The injured were taken to local hospitals, including a children’s hospital.
Ryan Carney, who lives with his mother in the street, said his mother saw emergency workers carrying children “covered in red, covered in blood. She said she could see the stab wounds in the backs of the children.”
“All this stuff never really happens around here,” he said. “You hear of it, stabbings and stuff like that in major cities, your Manchesters, your Londons. This is sunny Southport. That’s what people call it. The sun’s out. It’s a lovely place to be.”
Britain’s worst attack on children occurred in 1996, when Thomas Hamilton, 43, shot 16 kindergarten pupils and their teacher dead in a school gymnasium in Dunblane, Scotland. The U.K. subsequently banned the private ownership of almost all handguns.
Mass shootings and murders with firearms are rare in Britain. where knives were used in about 40% of homicides in the year to March 2023.
