Al Jazeera

By News Agencies

    UK police have said two people remain in life-threatening condition after the stabbing of 10 passengers on a London-bound train in eastern England, with “terrorism” ruled out in what officials described as “an isolated incident”.

    Police initially said nine of the 10 people wounded on Saturday were in a life-threatening condition. On Sunday, British Transport Police Superintendent John Loveless said four of those had since been discharged.

    So far, two people have been arrested over the attack, it added.

    The Cambridgeshire police said they were called at 19:39 GMT on Saturday after reports that multiple people had been stabbed on a train, the 6:25pm service from Doncaster to London King’s Cross.

    “Armed officers attended and the train was stopped at Huntingdon, where two men were arrested,” the police said.

    Defence Minister John Healey told Britain’s Sky News on Sunday that there did not appear to be a wider threat to the public after the incident on the London-bound train.

    “The early assessment is that this was an isolated incident, an isolated attack,” Healey told Sky News on Sunday.

Starmer ‘deeply saddened’

    Prime Minister Keir Starmer called it an “appalling incident” which was “deeply concerning”, while Interior Minister Shabana Mahmood said she was “deeply saddened” and urged people to avoid comment and speculation.

    The government is keen to stop rumours spreading on social media following an incident in Southport in northwest England in 2024, when internet claims over the murder of three young girls sparked days of rioting across the country.

    One witness described seeing a man with a large knife, and told The Times newspaper there was “blood everywhere” as people hid in the washrooms.

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    Some passengers were getting “stamped [on] by others” as they tried to run, and the witness told The Times that they “heard some people shouting we love [you]”.

    Another witness told Sky News that one of the suspects was tasered by police.

    London North Eastern Railway, or LNER, which operates the East Coast Mainline services in the UK, confirmed the incident had happened on one of its trains and said all its railway lines had been closed while emergency services dealt with the incident at Huntingdon station.

    LNER, which runs trains along the east of England and Scotland, urged earlier passengers not to travel, warning of “major disruption”.

    The mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Paul Bristow said in a post on X that he was hearing about “reports of horrendous scenes on a train in Huntingdon”.

    He added that his “thoughts are with everyone affected”.

    Knife crime in England and Wales has been steadily rising since 2011, according to official government data.

    While the UK has some of the strictest gun controls in the world, rampant knife crime has been branded a “national crisis” by Starmer.

    His Labour government has tried to rein in their use.

    Nearly 60,000 blades have been either “seized or surrendered” in England and Wales as part of government efforts to halve knife crime within a decade, the Home Office said on Wednesday.

    Carrying a knife in public can already get you up to four years in prison, and the government said knife murders had dropped by 18 percent in the last year.

    Two people were killed – one as a result of misdirected police gunfire – and others were wounded in a stabbing spree at a synagogue in Manchester at the start of October, an attack that shook the local Jewish community and the country.