Police in the United Kingdom have arrested two suspects after several people were taken to hospital following a stabbing on a train near Cambridgeshire in eastern England.
“We are currently responding to an incident on a train to Huntingdon where multiple people have been stabbed,” the British Transport Police said in a statement on X on Saturday.
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“Two people have been arrested,” it said.
Cambridgeshire police issued a separate statement, saying they were called at 19:39 GMT after reports that multiple people had been stabbed on a train.
“Armed officers attended and the train was stopped at Huntingdon, where two men were arrested. A number of people have been taken to hospital,” the police said.
The East of England Ambulance Service said it mobilised a large-scale response to Huntingdon Railway Station, which included numerous ambulances and critical care teams, including three air ambulances.
“We can confirm we have transported multiple patients to hospital,” it said.
One witness described seeing a man with a large knife, and told The Times newspaper there was “blood everywhere” as people hid in the washrooms.
Some passengers were getting “stamped [on] by others” as they tried to run, and the witness told The Times that they “heard some people shouting we love [you]”.
Another witness told Sky News that one of the suspects was tasered by police.
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UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the “appalling” incident was “deeply concerning”.
“My thoughts are with all those affected, and my thanks go to the emergency services for their response,” Starmer said in a statement on X.
“Anyone in the area should follow the advice of the police,” Starmer added.
London North Eastern Railway, or LNER, which operates the East Coast Mainline services in the UK, confirmed the incident had happened on one of its trains and said all its railway lines had been closed while emergency services dealt with the incident at Huntingdon station.
LNER, which runs trains along the east of England and Scotland, urged passengers not to travel, warning of “major disruption”.
It serves major stops, including in London, Peterborough, Cambridge, York and Edinburgh, and trains are often very busy and packed with travellers.
The mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, Paul Bristow, said in a post on X, “Hearing reports of horrendous scenes on a train in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire”, and added that his “thoughts are with everyone affected”.
Knife crime in England and Wales has been steadily rising since 2011, according to official government data.
While the UK has some of the strictest gun controls in the world, rampant knife crime has been branded a “national crisis” by Starmer.
His Labour government has tried to rein in their use.
Nearly 60,000 blades have been either “seized or surrendered” in England and Wales as part of government efforts to halve knife crime within a decade, the Home Office said on Wednesday.
Carrying a knife in public can already get you up to four years in prison, and the government said knife murders had dropped by 18 percent in the last year.
Two people were killed – one as a result of misdirected police gunfire – and others were wounded in a stabbing spree at a synagogue in Manchester at the start of October, an attack that shook the local Jewish community and the country.
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