A van has collided with pedestrians outside the well-known Finsbury Park Mosque in London, injuring several people.
The Metropolitan Police called it a “major incident” and said one person had been arrested at the scene.
Videos from the scene posted on Twitter showed crowds of people surrounding a police van that apparently held the driver of the van.
The London Ambulance Service said it had a number of crews at the site, while Transport for London advised drivers to seek an alternative route around the area.
The Independent reported witnesses’ accounts of the van veering off the road into crowds of worshippers as they left special Ramadan prayers shortly after midnight. It was not clear, though, whether the worshippers were coming directly from the mosque or a nearby Muslim Welfare House.
The Finsbury Park Mosque, in the London borough of Islington, was long linked with the fostering of extremists, with ‘shoebomber’ Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, who is in prison in the US for his part in the September 11 terror attack, known to have worshipped there. Extremist imam Abu Hamza al Masri in particular brought the mosque to prominence last decade with his habit of conducing sermons outside the building that called for the killing of ‘infidels’.
However, in recent years the mosque has reportedly undergone a transformation under a new management team, rebuilding its relationship with the local community.
The Sun reported that the van was a rental one, and that the incident came just two weeks after a rental van was used to kill pedestrians in the London Bridge terror attack. The mosque’s chairman told the newspaper that the accident outside the building was clearly a deliberate attempt to hurt people.
“We call it a terrorist attack as we called it in Manchester, Westminster and London Bridge,” Mohammed Kozbar said, according to The Sun.
The Met has not characterised the incident as a terror attack as yet, as it did not in the hours after the London Bridge and Borough Market incidents.