Several people were injured after a van plowed into a crowd of worshippers leaving prayers near a mosque in London.
According to witnesses, the vehicle diverted off the road into the worshippers in Finsbury Park shortly after midnight.
Update: A 48-year-old man has been arrested. Home Secretary Amber Rudd said the attack was being treated as a “terrorist incident.”
Eyewitness Abdul Rahman said the driver said he wanted to “kill all Muslims.”
Mr Rahman told the BBC he struck the man and helped subdue him.
“When the guy came out from his van he wanted to escape, run away and he was saying ‘I want to kill Muslims. ‘I want to kill Muslims.’ I hit him on his stomach… and then me and the other guys… we held him to the ground until he couldn’t move. We stopped him until the police came.”
via the Independent:
“From the window, I started hearing a lot of yelling and screeching, a lot of chaos outside,” a woman who lives opposite the scene told the BBC.
“Everybody was shouting: ‘A van’??s hit people, a van?’s hit people’.
“There was this white van stopped outside Finsbury Park mosque that seemed to have hit people who were coming out after prayers had finished.”
Footage showed injured people motionless on the pavement as angry crowds surrounded a white man believed to be the driver.
A witness told Buzzfeed News up to 10 people were injured, before passers-by managed to restrain the driver after he left the van.
The man said a crowd had previously stopped to help an elderly man who collapsed on the pavement and was undergoing CPR when the vehicle approached.
A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said officers were called to a “major incident” at 12.20am.
“Officers are on the scene with other emergency services,” he added. “There are a number of casualties being worked on at the scene. There has been one person arrested. Enquiries continue.”Police did not confirm claims Muslims were targeted after leaving a mosque following Tarawih prayers performed for the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
Harun Khan, Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “Shocked and outraged to hear a van has intentionally run over worshippers leaving Ramadan night prayers.”
As unconfirmed reports swirled, former EDL leader Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Lennon, was condemned for “attempting to justify” the attack by accusing the mosque of past links with extremists.
“I genuinely hope the innocent people targeted tonight outside the mosque are ok,” he later wrote on Twitter.
It was unclear whether worshippers had been leaving the Finsbury Park Mosque or nearby Muslim Welfare House, which said the incident happened “five minutes from us”.
Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation Muslim organisation, said the incident came as members of both mosques left prayers.
“It happened outside the Muslim Welfare House but people were leaving Finsbury Park Mosque as well so there’s a lot of confusion at the moment,” he told The Independent.
Prayers up for those injured. Story developing…
