Reading attack is the latest in seven years of terrorist knife attacks in the UK
The first terrorist knife attack in Britain remains the highest-profile, because of the target – a soldier – and the fact the bloody aftermath was caught on mobile phone footage. The killing of Fusilier Lee Rigby outside Woolwich barracks in May 2013 by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale was by no means the last of such low-tech attacks in Britain, however.
Several were foiled, including one planned by Brusthom Ziamani, a 19-year-old Muslim convert caught wandering the streets of east London with a knife, hammer and Isis flag hunting for a target the following year.
Three months later, in November 2014, Nadir Syed, 23, from Hounslow, west London, was arrested after buying an 11in kitchen knife at a shop in Ealing with a plan to attack a Remembrance Day poppy- seller.
Junead Khan, 25, a delivery driver from Luton, was arrested in July 2015 as he planned to stage a road accident and then kill a US airman outside a base in East Anglia with a combat knife. In December that year, Muhiddin Mire tried to behead a man at Leytonstone tube station in east London, shouting: “This is for Syria, I’m going to spill your blood”.
The following year, four men who called themselves the “Musketeers” were arrested for plotting an attack with a pipe bomb and a meat cleaver with the word “Kafir” [infidel] scratched into the blade after MI5 and police set up a fake courier company to catch them.
Then, in March 2017, Khalid Masood killed five people in Westminster, running over four victims on the bridge and then stabbing PC Keith Palmer to death. That sparked a series of copycat plots, with Ummariyat Mirza, 21, a trainee accountant from Alum Rock in Birmingham, arrested a week later after promising his wife he would murder people on their wedding day.
The next month, Mina Dich, 42, and her daughters Rizlaine Boular, 20, and Safaa Boular, 16, from Willesden in north London, were arrested after discussing a knife attack on a police officer outside parliament, in a plot they dubbed the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.
In June 2017, Khuram Butt, 27, Rachid Redouane, 32, and Youssef Zaghba, 22, ran down and killed two people on London Bridge and then stabbed to death six more using kitchen knives they had strapped to their wrists.
Then, last December, there was another knife attack on London Bridge when Usman Khan, 28, from Stoke-on-Trent, who had formerly been jailed for terror offences, killed two former Cambridge University students at a prisoner rehabilitation event at the Fishmonger’s Hall.
In February this year, Sudesh Faraz Amman, 20, from Harrow, North London, another former terrorism prisoner, was shot dead by undercover police officers as he launched a knife attack in Streatham, south London.
Source: The Guardian
