This afternoon’s terrorist attack on the Houses of Parliament in central Westminster left four dead, including the attacker and a police officer, and twenty injured, some seriously. For the third time in a year, a lone killer has used a vehicle as a weapon on the streets of a major European city. Yet again, the target seems to have been selected for its symbolic resonance. Last July, it was the Bastille Day celebrations in Nice, France. In December, it was the Christmas market in Berlin. Today, it was the Mother of Parliaments.
Just before 2:45 p.m. GMT, while the House of Commons was debating a proposal for a referendum on Scottish independence, a silver Hyundai 4×4 veered off the roadway of Westminster Bridge, which meets the northern bank of the Thames under the iconic “Big Ben” clock tower. As usual, the narrow sidewalk was crowded with tourists and office workers. The car left bodies strewn in its wake. Witnesses reported that the impact threw two bodies into the Thames; one woman was retrieved badly injured but alive.
The car then smashed into the iron railings near the base of the clock tower. As smoke came from its engine, a heavy-set “Asian” man got out—in Britain, “Asian” describes someone of Pakistani or Indian extraction—carrying two large knives. He approached the two duty officers on the Palace gate, and repeatedly stabbed one of them. As the other policeman ran for help, the attacker followed, running across the cobbled courtyard towards the entrance to the Parliament chamber. An armed policeman shot him three times in the chest.
Meanwhile, an estimated 40 to 50 yards from the gunfire, Prime Minister Teresa May was hurried into her armored Jaguar and away to nearby 10 Downing Street. In the chaos that followed, the House of Commons went into lockdown. Armed plainclothes police poured into Parliament, locking MPs in the House of Commons’ chamber while they swept the building. High overhead, tourists were trapped inside the viewing capsules of the London Eye.
While MPs tweeted photographs of anti-terrorist police racing through the Victorian Gothic lobby of the Commons, Conservative MP and Foreign Office minister Tobias Ellwood, an ex-soldier, joined medics in attempting to save the life of the policeman and the attacker. One of the two—it is not yet clear which—was wheeled away on a stretcher with his face covered.
At St. Thomas’ Hospital on the south side of Westminster Bridge, duty doctor Colleen Anderson confirmed that she had treated a police officer for a head injury, and that a female pedestrian had been killed on the bridge. Some of the injuries to pedestrians on the bridge were “minor,” but others were “catastrophic” and “life-changing.” Three of the injured were members of a party of French schoolchildren.
Teresa May has called a COBRA meeting (named for the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms in which emergency consultations are held) for later today. The Westminster attack fits the profile of recent vehicular attacks in Europe, and the dozens of similar attacks carried out by Palestinian terrorists in Israel. Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the congeries of online Islamists have all called upon their followers to adopt the car and the knife as weapons against Western civilians.
In Nice, on July 14, 2016, the Tunisian national Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel murdered 86 and injured 434 with a heavy cargo truck. In Berlin on December 19, another Tunisian national, Anis Amri, murdered 12 and injured 56 in a truck attack on the Christmas street market at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.
Amri, the Berlin attacker, was a failed asylum-seeker, and is known to have pledged allegiance to ISIS before his attack. Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the Nice attacker, had a criminal record, and his cell phone showed that he had been in contact with local Islamists who were under police surveillance. ISIS has claimed responsibility for his assault, just as it claimed to have inspired the Somali refugee Abdul Razak Ali Artan’s ramming and knife attack at Ohio State University in November 2016. But French police have struggled to directly link Lahouaiej-Bouhlel to Islamist groups, and so have investigators in the Ohio State attack.
Britain’s anti-terrorist investigators may face similar challenges in substantiating the links of this afternoon’s attacker. Some may hurry to attribute his actions to mental illness, or to minimize them as the suicide of a “lone wolf.” In a multiethnic city like London, this may have short-term value. But it is increasingly clear to both counter-terrorist analysts and the man or woman in the street that such attacks fall into a recognizable pattern.
The body count this afternoon was much lower than in Nice and Berlin. But that was because the target was much bigger. The Palace of Westminster is already heavily fortified against terrorist attack. Yet a single attacker was able to wreak havoc in the heart of London, and force the suspension of democratic debate in the Mother of all Parliaments.
This story has been updated.
Dominic Green, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
