Four people are still seriously injured in the hospital after a driver drove into a crowd of soccer fans in Liverpool, England on Monday. Nearly fifty people were injured. The driver of the car has been arrested.
On Monday evening, 27 injured people, including 4 children, had to be taken to the hospital. Twenty others were treated on the spot.
Earlier, the authorities spoke of two seriously injured, but now there are four. “We naturally hope they make it,” Mayor Steve Rotheram told BBC News.
Hundreds of thousands of Liverpool fans were in the city on Monday to celebrate the championship of coach Arne Slot’s club. Around 7:00 PM (Dutch time), a driver drove into the crowd on Water Street.
“The scenes in Liverpool are horrific. My thoughts are with all the injured and affected,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer reacted on X shortly after the incident.
Unusually much information about suspect
Later, the police reported that the 53-year-old driver of the car had been arrested. The police explicitly said that the suspect is a white British man from the Liverpool area. For the time being, it is assumed that he acted alone. The police are not treating the incident as terrorism.
According to well-known London former chief inspector Dal Babu, the police shared information about the ethnicity of the suspect exceptionally quickly. He points out that the same police force hesitated to provide information after a stabbing in Southport last year in which three girls died. At that time, false accusations were spread about the perpetrator, allegedly an Islamic asylum seeker.
“I think the ethnicity in this case has been announced to temper speculation from the extreme right,” says Babu. Mayor Rotheram asked people not to make assumptions.
The police are investigating the motive of the perpetrator and how the car could have entered a street that should have been accessible only to pedestrians because of the parade.