LONDON — Residents picked up broken bricks, broken glass and burned plastic Wednesday after Far-right protesters clashed with police. outside a mosque in a town in north-west England where three girls were stabbed to death.
A violent crowd of several hundred people threw bricks and bottles at riot police and set fire to rubbish bins and vehicles in Southport, hours after a peaceful vigil for the girls, aged 6, 7 and 9, who were murdered during a summer with the Taylor Swift theme. Christmas dance and yoga class. The ambulance service said it treated 39 injured police officers, 27 of whom were taken to hospitals.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer He condemned “matanismo” and said that the protesters had “kidnapped” the community’s pain.
The protesters, who police said were supporters of the far-right English Defense League, were fueled by anger and false rumors online about the 17-year-old suspect arrested on suspicion of murder and attempted murder.
Police said a name circulating on social media was incorrect and that the suspect was born in Britain, contrary to online claims that he was an asylum seeker. The names of suspects under 18 are not usually made public in Britain.
Patrick Hurley, the local lawmaker, said the violence perpetrated by “drunk thugs” was the result of “propaganda and lies” spread on social media.
“This misinformation doesn’t just exist in people’s Internet browsers and phones. It has a real-world impact,” she said.
The attack in Southport, a coastal town near Liverpool, is the latest shocking attack in a country where a recent rise in knife crime has stoked anxiety and led to calls for the government to do more to clamp down on knives, which are by far the most used instruments in homicides in the UK.
About two dozen children, mostly girls, were attending a Taylor Swift-themed summer holiday workshop Monday when a teen armed with a knife entered the studio and began a vicious attack, police said. Alice Dasilva Aguiar, 9, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Bebe King, 6, died from their injuries. Ten other people were injured, including five children and two adults are in critical condition.
Swift wrote on Instagram that she was still absorbing “the horror” of the event.
“These were just little kids in a dance class,” she wrote on Instagram. “I don’t know how to convey my condolences to these families.”
Witnesses described hearing screams and seeing children covered in blood in the chaos outside Hart Space, a community center that hosts everything from pregnancy workshops to boot camps for women.
Joel Verite, a window cleaner who was traveling in a van during his lunch break, said his colleague slammed on the brakes and reversed toward where a woman was hanging on the side of a car covered in blood.
“She just yelled at me, ‘He’s killing kids there.’ She is killing children there,’” Verite told Sky News.
“It was like a scene you’d see in a disaster movie,” he said. “I can’t explain to you how horrible what I saw is.”
Britain’s worst attack on children occurred in 1996, when Thomas Hamilton, 43, shot dead 16 kindergarteners and their teacher in a school gymnasium in Dunblane, Scotland. Later the United Kingdom banned private property of almost all firearms.
Mass shootings and gun murders are exceptionally rare in Britain, where knives were used in about 40% of homicides in the year to March 2023.
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