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British police on Saturday said they had arrested two people after “multiple” passengers were stabbed on a train in south-east England, in an incident that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer called “deeply concerning”.
Cambridgeshire police said they were called at 7.39pm with reports that several people had been stabbed on a train.
“Armed officers attended and the train was stopped at Huntingdon, where two men were arrested,” the force wrote on X. “A number of people have been taken to hospital.”
Starmer wrote on X: “The appalling incident on a train near Huntingdon is deeply concerning.”
Cambridgeshire police would neither confirm nor deny whether the incident was being treated as terrorism.
The response to the incident was being led by British Transport Police, the force that covers Great Britain’s rail system.
The stabbings took place on a service operated by LNER, the long-distance operator on the East Coast main line linking London to Leeds, Newcastle and Edinburgh, but it was not immediately clear where the affected train was heading.
Pictures on social media showed a heavy police and ambulance presence around the train, stopped at Huntingdon, around 70 miles north of London.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood urged people to “avoid comment and speculation at this early stage”.
However, the Conservatives’ shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, demanded immediate answers, saying the incident appeared to have been a “brutal mass stabbing”.
“The police and government should provide an update on what happened and who has been arrested as soon as possible,” he wrote on X.
Saturday’s incident comes just under a month after Jihad al-Shamie, a Syrian-born British citizen, launched a car and knife attack on a synagogue in Manchester during a service for the Yom Kippur holiday.
The attack ended in the deaths of two worshippers and the shooting dead of al-Shamie by police.
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