UPDATE: A man has been charged with attempted murder after he stabbed an 11-year-old girl on Monday in London’s Leicester Square, the police said on Tuesday.
Ioan Pintaru, 32, of no fixed address, will appear in court later on Tuesday.
London’s Metropolitan Police also said that an initial police report stating that the girl’s mother had been injured was incorrect.
“It was initially believed that the girl’s mother, a 34-year-old woman, was also hurt,” the police statement said, “however it was later confirmed that blood from her daughter’s injuries had been mistaken for injuries of her own.”
An 11-year-old girl was stabbed in London’s Leicester Square, a tourist hot spot, on Monday morning, the police said.
She was taken to a hospital, the police said in a post on social media, adding in a later update that the girl would require hospital treatment but that her injuries were not life-threatening.
The police said in a later statement that while they were continuing to investigate the suspect’s motive, “At this stage there is nothing to indicate the attack was terror-related.”
A 32-year-old man was arrested at the scene and the police said they did not believe there were any additional suspects. A video later emerged on social media showing police officers detaining the man, who was wearing a T-shirt with “Abbey Road” written on the front.
The episode came exactly two weeks after a deadly knife attack in Southport, near Liverpool, that led to the death of three young girls and injured eight other children and two adults. In the days after the stabbings in Southport, disinformation about the identity of the attacker, including a false claim that he was an undocumented migrant, spread rapidly online and ignited a series of violent riots around Britain.
In Leicester Square, an area in front of a shop called TWG Tea was cordoned off by blue and white police tape at 1:30 p.m., with a handful of police officers positioned at the scene. There were visible blood stains and a discarded baseball cap in the cordoned-off zone.
A man working as security in the tea shop said he had witnessed the attack and had intervened after the young girl was injured. Police officers then whisked the witness away for further questioning.
The BBC identified the employee as a 29-year-old named Abdullah. He told the BBC and the Press Association news agency that he had tackled the attacker, grabbing him and kicking the knife away before he and a few others held the man down until the police arrived. “I just saw a kid who was getting stabbed, and I just tried to save her,” he said in a video interview.
Two hours after the attack, hundreds of tourists continued to mill about the square. Shoppers at the Lego and M&M’s stores, which both frequently have long lines of people waiting to enter, craned their necks to see what was happening as a helicopter circled overhead.
Christina Jessah, a detective chief superintendent in charge of policing for Westminster, the central London borough containing Leicester Square, later paid tribute to workers from local businesses and members of the public who had intervened.
“They put themselves at risk and showed the best of London in doing so,” she said in a statement. She added that an investigation was continuing and the police were still working to establish what exactly happened.
“At this stage, we don’t believe the suspect and the victims were known to each other,” she said.
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