LONDON, U.K - British counter-terrorism police were Thursday investigating
the murder of a man thought to be a soldier, who was butchered and
beheaded on a busy London street by two men shouting Islamist slogans.
The attackers, wielding knives including a meat cleaver, carried out
the attack a few hundred metres (yards) from the Royal Artillery
Barracks in Woolwich, southeast London, then delivered an Islamist
tirade to passers-by.
Prime Minister David Cameron condemned the "appalling crime",
adding: "There are strong indications that it is a terrorist incident."
He cut short a visit to Paris to fly back for a meeting of the
government's emergency response committee, COBRA, which had already met
in the hours following the attack.
- Media reports citing witnesses said the men first ran over their victim in a car before finishing him off with the knives.
- Eyewitnesses described how after the two men carried out their attack, they stayed at the scene, asking passers-by to photograph and film them.
- Armed police shot and wounded the two attackers after they ran at officers, said witnesses. Both were being treated in hospital, said police.
- Amateur footage of one of the men carrying a blood-stained knife and meat cleaver shows him saying: "We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you."
- The man, a black man dressed in a hooded jacket and black woolly hat, speaks in a London accent.
- "We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," he says.
Source: Reuters
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