LONDON—A knife-wielding assailant driving a sport-utility (SUV) vehicle mowed down panicked pedestrians and stabbed a police officer outside Parliament on Wednesday in a deadly assault, prompting the hasty evacuation of the prime minister and punctuating the threat of terrorism in Europe.
At least five people, including the assailant, were killed and at least 40 others wounded in the confusing swirl of violence, which the police said they assumed had been “inspired by international terrorism”.
It appeared to be the most serious such assault in London since the deadly subway bombings more than a decade ago.
Throughout a turbulent afternoon, ambulances, emergency vehicles and heavily armed security officers thronged the area outside Parliament, as one of the busiest sections of London was cordoned off and evacuated.
Prime Minister Theresa May was rushed into a vehicle and spirited back to her office. She held a meeting of the government’s emergency committee and issued a statement on Wednesday night from her No. 10 Downing Street residence denouncing “the sick and depraved terrorist attack on the streets of our Capital this afternoon”.
May also said “the full details of exactly what happened are still emerging”, but she confirmed that the attack had been carried out by a lone male assailant.
As of late Wednesday, his identity had not been released, but Scotland Yard officials said they believed they knew who he was.
The attack unfolded around 2:40 p.m., Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley said at a news conference. Driving a large SUV, the assailant slammed into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge near Parliament, killing two people and wounding many others, before crashing into a railing. A third person injured on the bridge later died at a hospital.
After the crash, the driver left the vehicle and approached Parliament, where he stabbed an armed police officer to death and was fatally shot by the police.
The dead officer was identified as Keith Palmer, 48, a member of the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command with 15 years of experience.
“This is the day we have planned for but we hoped would never happen,” Rowley said. “Sadly, it’s now a reality.” The attack came on the anniversary of suicide bombings in Brussels that killed 32 people, along with three bombers.
It confirmed fears among counterterrorism officials that London, which had largely escaped recent terrorist attacks in Europe, would join cities like Paris, Brussels and Berlin as targets of mass violence.
“Terrorism affects us all, and France knows the pain the British people are enduring today,” President François Hollande of France said at a news conference in Villepinte, near Paris.
May, who spoke with Hollande and President Donald J. Trump, said in her statement that Parliament would meet as normal on Thursday. She vowed to never permit “the voices of hate and evil to drive us apart”.
Cmdr. B.J. Harrington of the Metropolitan Police said at a brief news conference earlier on Wednesday that a “full counterterrorism investigation is under way.” He asked members of the public to report any suspicious activity and to share any images or video of the violence. Harrington said the acting police commissioner, Craig Mackey, had been at the scene of the attack and was not wounded, but was “being treated as a significant witness”.
At least three police officers were among those wounded on the bridge. Also among the wounded were three 10th-grade boys from a group of visiting students from the Brittany region of France, and a woman who fell or plunged into the River Thames.
Hollande’s government said it had chartered a plane to London with families of the French victims. Tobias Ellwood, a minister in the Foreign Office, tried to save the life of the fatally stabbed police officer by giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
The number of wounded apparently included five South Korean tourists who were overwhelmed by a crowd fleeing the scene, South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said on Thursday morning.
Three men suffered fractures, and a woman had surgery for a head injury, the ministry said.
For more than two hours, astonished lawmakers inside the House of Commons, some of whom had ducked for cover, were told to stay in place as officers searched the premises, office by office.
“At the moment, the very clear advice from the police and the director of security in the house is that we should remain under suspension, and that the chamber should remain in lockdown until we’ve received advice that it is safe to go back to normal procedures,” David Lidington, the leader of the House of Commons, or lower house of Parliament, told lawmakers in remarks broadcast live on the BBC.
Olly Grender, a member of the House of Lords, said lawmakers were staying put. “We were in a meeting, I heard shouting through the window,” she said, adding that a colleague then came in to tell them a serious episode had taken place.
Jayne Wilkinson, 59, from Birmingham, was near the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square with her partner, David Turner, 56, when they saw people suddenly running from Parliament.
The couple said they had seen a middle-aged man holding a knife. He ignored warnings from the police, running through the gates into the Parliament compound, she said.
“They were shouting to warn him,” Wilkinson said. Soon after, she and her partner heard three gunshots and saw the man on the ground. Three construction workers inside the grounds of Westminster Palace said they had heard shots fired in rapid succession before they were escorted off the premises. “It was bang-bang-bang,” one said.
Reuben Saunders, an American student at Cambridge University who was visiting Parliament, said he had been leaving the building when he saw a police officer accosted by an assailant armed with two knives or similar weapons.
“He was at the gate, I heard screaming,” Saunders said. “I saw the man on the ground being repeatedly stabbed, or pummeled.”
Saunders said two or three other police officers arrived, and “there were two or three gunshots”. Corinne Desray, a teacher who was outside Parliament with 39 teenage students on a three-day school trip from northern France, said they had heard three shots.
“My colleague saw bodies lying on the floor and someone said a policeman has been knived,” she said. “I told the kids to leave quickly, we’re heading back to the bus.”
Kirsten Hurrell, 70, who owns a newsstand opposite Big Ben, said she had seen a car swerve across a bicycle lane and into a fence around Parliament. She saw a body lying on the ground and called emergency services.
“At first I thought it was an accident, but then I was told the car had already mowed down quite a number of people on Westminster Bridge,” she said, adding: “Now that it is a terrorist incident, it is a bit more daunting.”
Image credits: Andrew Testa/The New York Times