Police secure the area where a man has been detained and a knife seized, in Southport, Merseyside, England, Monday, July 29, 2024. Several people were injured in a reported stabbing incident. | Photo credit: AP
A teenage boy launched a knife attack on a children’s dance and yoga class in northwest England on Monday, killing two children and injuring 11 others, police and witnesses said. The “horrific” attack sent bloodied children running into the street to escape.
Merseyside Police said a 17-year-old boy had been arrested on suspicion of murder and attempted murder over the attack in the seaside town of Southport, near Liverpool. The motive for the attack remains unclear, but police said detectives were not treating the attack as terrorism-related.
Police said nine children were injured, six of them in critical condition. Two adults who tried to rescue the injured are also in critical condition.
Police Chief Constable Serena Kennedy said: “We believe the adults who were injured were bravely trying to protect children who were being attacked.”
The Taylor Swift-themed workshop was held in the first week of the school holidays for children aged 6 to 11. The two-hour session advertised promised yoga, dance and bracelet-making.
Eyewitnesses said they heard horrific screams and saw children soaked in blood.
“They were on the street, running from the nursery,” said Bere Varathan, who owns a nearby shop. “They were stabbed here, here, here, everywhere,” he said, pointing to their necks, backs and chests.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer described the attack as “appalling and absolutely shocking”.
Merseyside Police said officers were called to an address in Southport, a seaside town of about 100,000 people near Liverpool, at around midday. Police described it as a “major incident” but said there was no serious risk to the public.
“When they arrived they were shocked to find that several people, most of them children, had been brutally attacked and had suffered serious injuries,” Kennedy said.
Auto body shop owner Colin Perry said most of the stabbing victims appeared to be young girls.
“The mothers are coming in here now and screaming,” Parry said. “It’s like a scene from a horror movie. … It’s like something out of America, not sunny Southport.”
Police said the suspect, who has not been identified, lived in a village about 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the site of the attack. He was originally from Cardiff, Wales.
Ryan Carney, who lives across the street with his mother, said his mother saw emergency workers carrying children “who were covered in red paint and covered in blood. She said she could see knife wounds on the children’s backs.”
“It never happens here,” he said. “You hear about it, the stabbings in the bigger cities, Manchester, London and things like that. This is sunny Southport. That’s what people call it. The sun is out. It’s a lovely place.”
The worst attack on children in Britain was in 1996, when 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton shot and killed 16 kindergarten students and their teacher in a school gymnasium in Dunblane, Scotland. Britain then banned private ownership of almost all handguns.
Mass shootings and murders with firearms are rare in the UK, where knives were used in about 40% of murders up to March 2023. Several headline-grabbing attacks and a recent rise in knife crime have raised concerns and calls for the government to do more to curb bladed weapons.