Incident outside Parliament

[Galfon]

Not a good place to have car problems - armed Police, area cordoned off...unclear at moment if problems were
a result of a deliberate act.

[Digby]

Sounds deliberate but hopefully ineffective

[Mellsblue]

Two injured, but not life threatening, is the latest I’ve heard.

[Galfon]

The unidentified individual appeared to have set out to hurt people ( ploughing into cyclists and pedestrians ), and tried to ram through the barrier, but no weapons on his person or in the car. He was not co-operating with police and the suspicion is the incident is terror related.
Reports are that he is from the Birmingham area.
No doubt there will be a wave of arrests and visits following, once his network of contacts is known.

[Mellsblue]

This may be the first terrorist attack in history where ISIS don’t try and claim the credit.

[Buggaluggs]

He's from Birmingham. Maybe he's trying to cooperate, but they just don't understand him.

[Sandydragon]

Hoping that the injured cyclist makes a full recovery and very grateful that this wasn’t much worse.

[Digby]

I hope we don't close the roads around parliament, it'd only drive attacks away from what's a well defended site

[Galfon]

The driver was in London apparently seeking to sort his visa out to visit family in Sudan, the country of his birth from which he was granted asylum and refugee status before uk nationalisation ...not sure if routine questions follow such requests but it would be disappointing if there weren't any.
.

[Galfon]

The driver has been charged with attempted murder.
after allegedly swerving his car into cyclists and pedestrians and the case is being treated as terrorism..

[Puja]

The driver has been charged with attempted murder.
after allegedly swerving his car into cyclists and pedestrians and the case is being treated as terrorism..

Obviously, the security services will have information that they'll be keeping under their hat and may have definitive proof of things, but is anyone else wondering if the driver's just a random loon and the police are just claiming possible terrorism so that they get extra powers if they need them. I mean, I don't think even ISIS have claimed this was part of their plot to overthrow the West, and they'll claim it if a car backfires.

Puja

[Galfon]

It would be a worrying shift for the authorities and a dramatic shift by anyone influencing the likes of this chap, if indeed the intent was to utilise hitherto innocuous persons not on the radar, with elaborate and plausible explanations to link with time/place/acts...there appears to be alot of co-incidences and parallels with this case, even from minimal info. presented to us honest johns, and he certainly over-egged the pudding for his acquaintances' stress/tired/panic theories.
Not discounting, of course, the completely independent randomly inspired wobbly.

[Eugene Wrayburn]

The driver has been charged with attempted murder.
after allegedly swerving his car into cyclists and pedestrians and the case is being treated as terrorism..

Obviously, the security services will have information that they'll be keeping under their hat and may have definitive proof of things, but is anyone else wondering if the driver's just a random loon and the police are just claiming possible terrorism so that they get extra powers if they need them. I mean, I don't think even ISIS have claimed this was part of their plot to overthrow the West, and they'll claim it if a car backfires.

Puja

It looks very much like random loon. If they've charged him and haven't included any terrorist offences it pretty much means that they have no evidence of a terrorist purpose beyond where it took place and the broad nature. It's possible GCHQ have picked up some relevant chatter since the incident which implicates terrorism but the announcement immediately afterwards was that he wasn't known to intelligence. That they're treating it as a terrorist incident basically only means that it's currently being investigated out of that budget by those officers.

[Which Tyler]

Of course, it's perfectly possible that it's some random loon who said "Allah Ackbar" as he was arrested.
Doesn't mean that there's any ISIS link; doesn't mean it was particularly premeditated or even slightly coordinated; but it does mean that they're going to investigate in a bit more detail than they would normally.
Plenty of examples of random loons just looking for some notoriety - in the US they grab a gun and go to school; or they can just claim terrorist sympathies