A 53-year-old man drove into a huge crowd of Liverpool fans celebrating their Premier League triumph in the city centre leading to dozens of people being injured
Police took an “unprecedented” step by moving “very quickly” to say the suspect in the Liverpool parade crash was a white British man, says a former chief superintendent.
After news broke that a car had ploughed into a crowd in Water Street on Monday, Merseyside police said that it was a 53-year-old man and gave his ethnicity. The force added that he was from the Liverpool area and the incident was not being treated as terrorism. And former Metropolitan Police Ch Supt Dal Babu believes it was deliberately done to stop a swell of speculation on social media about the race of the driver.
“What we do have, which is unprecedented, is the police very quickly giving the ethnicity and the race of the person who was driving the vehicle,” he said, while comparing it to what happened following the tragic fatal stabbings of three girls in Southport last year.
“It was Merseyside Police who didn’t give that information with the Southport horrific murders of those three girls, and the rumours were that it was an asylum seeker who arrived on a boat and it was a Muslim extremist and that wasn’t the case.
“So I think what the police have done very very quickly, and I’ve never known a case like this before where they’ve given the ethnicity and the race of the individual who was involved in it, so I think that was to dampen down some of the speculation from the far-right that sort of continues on X even as we speak that this was a Muslim extremist and there’s a conspiracy theory.”
Asked if it was a result of Merseyside Police having learned the lessons from what happened after Southport, he said: “Yeah, absolutely, I think you’re spot on.
“It’s remarkably striking because police will not release that kind of information because they’ll be worried about prejudicing any future trial, but I think they have to balance that against the potential of public disorder and we had massive public disorder after the far-right extremists had spread these rumours.”
Referring to the general dangers of social media he added: “The difficulty we have is in the olden days, when I was policing, you would have a conversation with trusty journalists, print journalists, radio journalists, broadcasting journalists, you’d have a conversation and say look can you please hold fire on sharing this information and people would listen, we don’t have that with social media, it’s like the wild west and anything goes and so puts the police in a very, very difficult position.”
Four children are among around 50 who were injured in Liverpool – including one youngster who was seriously hurt. Nick Searle, Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service chief fire officer, said four people who were trapped under the car, including a child, were rescued by firefighters.
At a press conference late on Monday evening, Dave Kitchin from North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) said 27 people were taken to hospital and 20 people were treated at the scene, with four children among the injured.
He said two of those taken to hospital, including one of the children, suffered serious injuries. Mr Kitchin said some patients had also taken themselves to local hospitals.
On Tuesday morning a police cordon remained in place at the scene, with a large police van parked in front of a blue tent on the road and officers stationed along the street.
Empty bottles and cans littered the road and a Liverpool flag was attached to the top of traffic lights. The Strand was reopened to traffic as usual.
