Scottish police on Friday killed the alleged perpetrator of an attack in the city of Glasgow, committed at a refugee hotel and whose motives are unknown, which left six people injured including an agent.
A large police device was deployed in the city center and several streets were cordoned off as a result of the attack, the nature of which has yet to be determined, an AFP journalist at the scene found.
“The individual the police opened fire on is dead,” said Steve Johnson, a Scottish police official. “Six other people are in the hospital, including a policeman, who is in a critical but stable condition,” he added.
According to the Scottish Police Federation, an organization representing officers, the latter was stabbed.
The event occurred around the Park Inn Hotel, which according to Positive Action in Housing, an organization specialized in housing migrants, was welcoming asylum seekers during the coronavirus pandemic.
The country’s policy makers reacted quickly expressing dismay.
British Prime Minister Boris JohnsonHe claimed to be “deeply saddened” by the “terrible” events in Glasgow and expressed his regret to the victims and their families.
For her part, Scottish Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon called the attack “truly terrible”.
– One week after Reading –
A witness quoted by the British news agency PA claimed to have seen four people being evacuated from the scene by ambulance.
The witness, Craig Milroy, who said he works in a nearby office, explained that he saw a man “of African origin” on the ground, without shoes, “with a person by his side” holding him.
“I don’t know if it was a bullet wound, or a knife wound or what it was”he added.
Another witness, identified as Louisa, told the Sky News television channel that she saw bloody people lying on the ground, who were attended by rescuers.
“I saw people running out of the hotel, the police yelling ‘hands up, hands up, get out!'” He said. “There were police cars, ambulances all over the street that was cordoned off. The police were yelling at people in other buildings near the Park Inn Hotel to stay inside.”
This attack occurs less than a week after three people died after being stabbed in a park in the city of Reading, in the south-east of England, in an attack that the British police investigated as a “terrorist” act.
According to the British press, the author of that attack, a Libyan refugee with mental health problems, had been on the radar of the British intelligence services without any imminent risk having been identified.
He had been jailed in October for non-terrorism crimes, including a racist attack on a female police officer in 2018, and released in early June, according to the same source.
In a tribute to the victims on Monday, Interior Minister Priti Patel said the country’s security services have foiled 25 attacks in the past three years, eight of which were promoted by the extreme right.
Unchanged, the level of the terrorist threat in the UK is rated “significant”, third degree on a scale of five.
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