Car hits pedestrians at UK parliament in suspected terrorist attack

LONDON: A man deliberately drove a car into London pedestrians and cyclists on Tuesday before ramming it into barriers outside Britain’s parliament in what police said appeared to be the second terrorist attack at the building in just under 18 months.

Three people were injured. The driver, a 29-year-old British citizen, was arrested by armed officers moments later. He was not cooperating with detectives, the British police counter-terrorism chief said.

“Given that this appears to be a deliberate act, the method, and this being an iconic site, we are treating it as a terrorist incident,” the officer, London Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, told reporters.

In March 2017, Khalid Masood, 52, killed four people on nearby Westminster Bridge and stabbed an unarmed police officer to death in the grounds of parliament before being shot dead.

It was the first of five attacks in Britain last year that police designated as terrorism, three of which used vehicles as weapons.

Basu said the suspect had not been formally identified, but was not believed to be known to security forces. Britain’s security minister Ben Wallace said he was a British citizen who “came from another country originally”.

The BBC, citing unnamed sources, said the man was from the Birmingham area and known to police, although not to intelligence or counter-terrorism agencies.

Police later searched three addresses, two in Birmingham and one in Nottingham, central England.