Police in London are investigating four suspected murders carried out over the weekend, including fatal shootings, and a string of stabbings.
A 44-year-old man was arrested after a mother and three children, all aged under 12, according to the BBC, were stabbed in their home in Enfield, north London, on Saturday, sustaining “very serious injuries” which have left an 11-year-old girl in a “critical” condition.
Two more people were stabbed in a separate incident in Hounslow, west London — two men in their mid-20s and mid-30s — with one now “stable” but the other in critical condition, also on Saturday afternoon, with a man and a woman being arrested in connection with the incident.
These incidents followed two more stabbings, reportedly inflicted over the course of a fight, near Forestdale Primary School in Croydon, south London, on Friday night, for which a man in his 20s was arrested and then released under investigation.
A shooting victim in his 30s in Wembley, north-west London, was even less fortunate, dying from his injuries shortly after being transported to hospital from the scene of the crime near a local mosque on Friday.
He was the first of two deadly shooting victims over the course of the weekend, with another man in his 20s being shot dead on Sunday in Leyton, east London, reportedly after an altercation with two suspects, also in their twenties, who were also injured and taken to hospital for treatment.
“This incident will no doubt alarm and shock those in the local community especially coming so soon after a fatal shooting in Wembley on Friday night,” admitted Inspector Sammi Elsitur of the Metropolitan Police.
The weekend also saw another suspected killing in Wembley, with a man with serious head injuries being pronounced dead at the scene at Brent River Park on Sunday night — although it is not clear how the injuries were inflicted — and two more reported shootings.
One involved a firearms discharge at shop in Harrow, north-west London, on Saturday, in which nobody was injured, and another saw a man shot in the arm in Brent, also in north-west London, with police finding four casings and a car with a bullet hole in the windscreen at the scene.
The fourth suspected killing involved a woman in her 50s who was found dead in a garage in Blackheath, south London, and is the least immediately explicable of the killings.
Police say that “[the] cause of death has not been determined,” but that the woman was found with “injuries suggestive of third party involvement”.