Mayor Sadiq Khan has hailed the “good news” that a triple stabbing in Bishopsgate, London, “was not a terror attack”.
Thugs on bicycles are believed to have been attempting a knifepoint phone snatch robbery in broad daylight, not even 200 metres from a police station, when several ‘have a go heroes’ intervened — resulting in a melee in which three people were stabbed.
A construction worker who witnessed the violent attack first-hand described the attackers merely as “two teenagers dressed all in black with balaclavas on ” who “started trying to rob a middle-aged man, who was dressed in a suit and looked like he was on his way to work” in comments to The Telegraph.
“They were really laying into him… A guy on a moped wearing a red jumper came out of nowhere and leapt off his bike onto the pavement and tried to help. The attackers stabbed him and he fell back clutching his stomach,” he recalled.
“Without his help I think the guy they were trying to rob could be dead. It was really brutal. He was a proper hero.
“Another man, who was also dressed in a suit also tried to help and he was bleeding heavily from his head or mouth, I couldn’t tell. He looked in a bad way. He was holding his head in his hands,” he added.
The City of London Police — a separate force from the more (in)famous Metropolitan Police, responsible for policing the quasi-autonomous Square Mile which is home to much of the British capital’s financial centre — had as of the time of publication failed to either apprehend the suspects or issue a physical description of them.
Mayor Sadiq Khan, of the leftist Labour Party, issued a bizarre response on the bloody incident, insisting “the good news, and it is good news, [is] it’s not a terror attack” — which will make little difference in practical terms to the people who have been stabbed.
Khan added that the “other piece of good news” was that the three stabbing victims “aren’t in life-threatening situations”.
He went on to suggest that “it’s a reminder of the dangers of carrying the knife” — although it might more accurately be described as a reminder of the dangers of being attacked by someone else carrying a knife, particularly in a country where ordinary citizens are barred from carrying even so much as a can of pepper spray for self-defence.
Khan’s role in the City of London is more limited than in Greater London, given it possesses its own ancient government, but as the head of the Greater London Authority which encompasses the City it is not entirely beyond his purview.
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