London
Rival party leaders lashed out at one another as police raided homes and carried out a dozen arrests, and as the nation mourned. Tens of thousands attended a benefit concert that was originally intended to honor the dead from last month’s suicide bombing in Manchester but was expanded to recognize the newest victims in London.
Following the Manchester attack, Saturday night’s van-and-knife rampage was the second mass-casualty attack to intrude on the homestretch of a parliamentary campaign that was once thought certain to end in a landslide for Prime Minister Theresa May. But the race has tightened in recent weeks, and terrorism has introduced an unexpected variable.
With her premiership on the line, May on Sunday took an aggressive and combative tone, telling the nation that “enough is enough” and insisting there is “far too much tolerance for extremism in our country.”
“Things need to change,” May said in a speech outside the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street.
She blamed the attack on the “evil ideology of Islamist extremism,” called for a thorough review of the nation’s counterterrorism policies and suggested she will take a much tougher line if she wins Thursday’s vote.
The speech was criticized by the opposition Labour Party as a thinly veiled jab at their far-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn, whom May has often accused of coddling anti-Western militants. May, Corbyn’s backers insisted, had politicized the attack.
But by evening, Corbyn had hit back with his own political response to the killing, accusing May and her Conservative allies of weakening security services through years of austerity.
“You cannot protect the public on the cheap,” Corbyn said in a speech in the northern English city of Carlisle that ended a brief pause in formal campaigning. “The police and security services must get the resources they need, not 20,000 police cuts.”
Corbyn also derided President Trump, accusing him of lacking both “grace” and “sense” after the U.S. leader twisted a quote from London Mayor Sadiq Khan in order to launch an attack on the West’s most prominent Muslim politician.
May, who has gone to great lengths to cultivate ties with Trump, had earlier defended Khan while carefully avoiding any criticism of the U.S. president.
The multi-layered controversy came as investigators were just beginning to try to unravel details of the assailants and plot behind the killings, which jolted the country Saturday night.
At just after 10 p.m. that evening, three men plowed a rented Renault van into a crowd of pedestrians on London Bridge before getting out and using knives to slash bar and restaurant patrons at the nearby Borough Market.
The attackers were fatally shot by police within eight minutes of the first emergency call, with eight officers firing a total of 50 rounds at men who had donned camouflage and fake suicide vests to carry out the carnage.
British authorities did not identify the victims. But Canada’s prime minister and France’s foreign minister both confirmed that their nationals were among the dead.
Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley said in a late afternoon news conference on Sunday that investigators were still trying to confirm the identities of the attackers and that they were “increasingly confident” there were no other perpetrators. He said police still had “more to do” to determine whether the assailants had any help in planning the attack.
Rowley praised the performance of officers in responding to the attack — a view that was echoed almost universally on Sunday — and described the number of shots fired as “unprecedented” in a country where most officers do not carry a firearm and those who do rarely, if ever, use it.
The fusillade, Rowley said, was necessary “to be completely confident (officers) had neutralized the threat that those men posed.”
At least 48 people were injured in the attack — including one bystander who was shot by an errant police bullet and was expected to recover. Four officers were among the injured. Rowley said on Sunday that 21 of those injured are in critical condition.
As doctors and nurses tended to the wounded, police carried out raids in the east London neighborhood of Barking in a signal that authorities are probing at least the possibility that others may have been involved in the planning of the attack. A dozen people were arrested, police said.
In Barking, neighbors said police had taken at least five people away early Sunday from a mixed-income, 10-story building believed to have been home to one of the attackers. Neighbors said that they heard loud bangs during the raid and that one of the men who was ultimately arrested had tried to flee.
Even as the investigation intensified, authorities did not raise the nation’s threat level, as they had after a bombing in Manchester last month.
The decision suggested authorities do not believe another attack is imminent, though under the existing “severe” rating, one is highly likely.
Investigators were focused on the likelihood that the attack had been inspired, if not directed, by the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility on Sunday (though similar claims in the past have been shown to be unreliable).
The militant group has called on its followers to carry out attacks in the West, especially during the holy month of Ramadan.
Saturday’s killings follow both the Manchester attack as well as a March attack that was eerily similar in style to the one that unfolded at and around London Bridge, with an attacker ramming pedestrians on a different Thames River crossing and stabbing to death a police officer at the gates of Parliament.
The three recent attacks were not connected, May said. But she described it as “a new trend” in which terrorists are “copying one another and often using the crudest means of attack.”
May did not detail her plans for confronting the threat.