This afternoon Prime Minister Boris Johnson has held an emergency Cobra meeting after police have said that yesterday’s explosion outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital. “has been declared a terrorist incident” but that its motivation is “yet to be understood”.
The UK’s terror threat has since been raised from “substantial” to “severe”, meaning a terror attack is “highly likely”.
Home Secretary Priti Patel said: “Following yesterday’s shocking incident in Liverpool, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre has raised the UK Threat Level to SEVERE.
“It is important that the public remains alert to the threat from terrorism but not alarmed. I urge anyone with information or who suspects any suspicious activity to report it to the police,” she went on.
Three men were arrested in Liverpool yesterday under the Terrorism Act, after one man was killed in a car.
A fourth man has since been arrested in connection with the blast.
Merseyside Police said a taxi carrying a sole passenger pulled up at the hospital moments before 11:00AM, when the two minutes’ silence for Remembrance Sunday was set to begin, and exploded.
The site is close to Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral, where the Remembrance Sunday service was ongoing.
Police said a potential connection with remembrance events were a line of inquiry.
The passenger was declared dead at the scene.
It is has been reported by The Telegraph newspaper that he was of Middle Eastern origin and was not known to MI5.
The taxi driver David Perry was injured but has since been discharged from hospital.
There are reports, not yet confirmed by police, that Perry had realised that the passenger was in possession of a bomb and locked him in the car before it detonated.
People were evacuated from their houses on Rutland Avenue in the city as police continued their investigations into the night.
The incident comes just weeks after Conservative MP Sir David Amess was killed after being stabbed multiple times by a 25-year-old man during a constituency surgery.
The Metropolitan Police has since said the attacker had potential links to Islamist extremism.
