Road Traffic accident in London - 11 injured

This afternoon there was an unfortunate Road Traffic Accident outside the Natural History Museum in which eleven people were injured.

Twitter went mental with various people speculating (often from the other side of the Atlantic) that it was a terrorist attack.

The Metropolitan police have issued a statement saying that they are treating this incident as a road traffic accident which is not terror-related.

The Met also said that none of the injuries were believed to be life-threatening or life changing.

Comments

Jim said…
Terrorism is becoming pretty much a knee jerk reaction to a lot of things, its moved from being the last suspect to the first sadly.
5:05 pm
Anonymous said…
Everyone's a terrorist now, at least the police use terrorism laws against everyone.
8:29 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
Jim, I think you've nailed it. We really need to avoid mass panic every time there is a Road Traffic Accident because people jump to the false conclusion that it's an act of terrorism.

Anti-Terror laws can easily be too widely used. I would not go so far as to say that the police do use them against everyone - most of our police officers are better than that - but it is important that parliament should carefully scrutinise all proposed anti-terror laws to make it as hard as possible for measures intended to protect us from terrorism cannot develop "mission creep" which enables them to be used against a much wider range of people.

E.g. against parents who are using methods they thought were within the rules to try to get their kids into the best schools.

Or worse, against people expressing an opinion the authorities don't like as when octengarian holocaust survivor Walter Wolfgang was briefly held under anti-terror laws for calling the then Labour foreign secretary a liar.

(Had they arrested him under the official secrets act, getting him acquitted might have been more difficult ...)
10:00 pm
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