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Six injured in Glasgow attack, suspect killed by police

Scottish police killed Friday the suspect of an attack in Glasgow which left six wounded, including a member of the police force, in a hotel accommodating refugees and who is not regarded as “terrorist” by the investigators.

A large police force was deployed around 1 p.m. (12:00 GMT) in the city center after what was presented by the British media as a knife attack, less than a week after that which killed three people in Reading, near London.

The events in Glasgow are not “terrorism”, according to the police. This did not prevent according to the Scottish Minister of Justice Humza Yousaf the “depressing” instrumentalization of “this horrible incident” by supporters of the far right. “Glasgow will not support you in your divisive hatred, so don’t even try,” he added in a tweet.

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Man “on whom police opened fire is dead” and six other injured men are in hospital, including a stabbed 42-year-old policeman who is in “critical but stable” condition, said on Twitter. Scottish police official Steve Johnson. The others injured are between 17 and 53 years old.

According to the association Positive Action in Housing, the establishment where the events took place welcomed asylum seekers sheltered during the confinement imposed to fight against the spread of the new coronavirus.

“During this COVID-19 pandemic, the hotel was used as temporary accommodation,” confirmed Tom Flanagan Karttunnen, spokesperson for the Radisson Hotel Group.

The Scottish Kurdish Association, quoted by the Glasgow Times newspaper, said that around 100 asylum seekers were staying there and complained of being stranded inside, without money, while some suffered from health problems. .

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“There are a lot of mental health problems in this place, where people do not have access to care because important appointments were canceled during the epidemic,” the Afghan commission president told AFP. human rights Mohammad Asif, also a resident of the neighborhood. According to him, this could be “one of the reasons” for the attack, even if it “does not excuse him”.

The political leaders quickly expressed their emotion. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was “deeply saddened” by these “terrible” events when Scottish Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon called the news from Glasgow “truly horrible”.

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Help calls

“I was here and a guy held his chest as if he had been stabbed,” said AFP Cole Tonnee, a local resident who skateboarded nearby, “there was blood everywhere because that there were people who were trying to fight for their lives. ”

A Malaysian man on the third floor of the hotel told Sky News that he heard a man call for help and a woman cried out. Going down to see what was going on, he found the elevator “covered in blood” and two people “out of breath” after being stabbed.

“There were police cars, ambulances all over the street that was cordoned off,” a woman named Louise told Sky News, “The police were yelling at people from other buildings near the Park Inn hotel to stay at the interior ”.

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The attack came less than a week after three men were fatally stabbed on Saturday in Reading, West London. The anti-terrorist police were then seized.

According to the British press, its author, a Libyan refugee suffering from mental health problems, was on the radar of the intelligence services without any imminent risk having been identified.

He was imprisoned in October for crimes unrelated to terrorism, including the racist assault of a policewoman in 2018 and voluntary degradations, and released in early June, according to the same source.

Unchanged, the level of the terrorist threat remains classified as “significant”, ie the third degree on a scale of five.

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