Six people, including two children, were treated for exposure to a suspected chemical substance following an attempted robbery at a Co-op in Birmingham.
The incident took place at 2:30pm on Wednesday at the supermarket in the Northfield area of Birmingham, the UK’s ‘second city’.
Police said that two people were attempting to shoplift from the store, and when confronted by staff, threw a substance “believed to be non-corrosive” in the direction of the employees, the Daily Mail reports.
Police, ambulance, the Hazardous Area Response Team, and fire crews attended with a spokesman for West Midlands Ambulance Service saying: “We’re currently treating six patients — two children and four adults. They’ve all been exposed to an unknown substance. All are said to be in a stable condition.”
The tabloid reports that witnesses heard children screaming after the incident, with one woman saying a suspected victim was being treated in an ambulance “after they breathed in the substance and were coughing”.
The incident occurred after two men suffered burn injuries in a suspected acid attack in Stourbridge, some 13 miles from Birmingham, on Sunday while both victims were sitting in a van near a popular children’s party venue.
In July 2018, a three-year-old child was deliberated targetted in an acid attack in Worcester, with a court later finding guilty the boy’s own father who orchestrated the “monstrous” assault with five other co-conspirators. While in 2017 in London, an attacker threw acid at a two-year-old boy in his pram whilst he was out for a walk with his parents.
Last week, a report revealed that acid attacks were at record levels in London, with one criminologist determining that the city had become “the acid attack hotspot in the western world”.
Acid attacks had increased in London more than tenfold in the six years between 2012 and 2018, with acid being increasingly used in robberies, revenge attacks, and domestic violence. Of the 752 victims last year, some were children under the age of ten.