Police quickly gave details on Liverpool car ramming, aiming to prevent rumors

Boston Globe

27-05-2025

The decision to disclose the driver's race and nationality so quickly appeared calculated to defuse the rumors and misinformation that have spread after other recent violent episodes in Britain.
Last summer, after a British-born man with parents from Rwanda fatally stabbed three young girls at a dance studio in Southport, a town north of Liverpool, false reports that the assailant was an undocumented Muslim migrant spread rapidly online. The next day, a riot broke out in Southport, the first of several in cities and towns across England.
By the time police announced that the assailant, Axel Rudakubana, had been born in Britain, the erroneous reports had reached millions of people. A false name, 'Ali Al-Shakati,' circulated online for a day before the clarification from the authorities.
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In that case, police were legally barred from disclosing the suspect's identity and received 'inconsistent advice' from prosecutors about whether they could confirm that he was not Muslim. Afterward, a parliamentary committee report into the riots, which far-right figures had fomented online, concluded that restrictions on what the police can say in criminal cases were 'not fit for the social media age.'
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On Monday, the Merseyside Police, who also responded to the attack at the Southport dance studio, seemed keenly aware of that history.
Shortly before 8 p.m., less than two hours after the first reports that a vehicle had hit pedestrians on the crowded street in central Liverpool, police issued a statement saying, 'We can confirm the man arrested is a 53-year-old white British man from the Liverpool area.'
The timing of the announcement was not by itself unusual, but the level of detail about the person arrested was.
At a news conference about 2 1/2 hours later, the assistant chief constable of the Merseyside Police, Jenny Sims, described the episode as an 'isolated incident' and said it was not being treated as a terrorist attack.
She urged people 'not to speculate on the circumstances' or to share harrowing footage of the car plowing through a street filled with fans who had gathered to celebrate the Liverpool soccer club's Premier League championship.
That did not stop people from posting the images, and a smaller number from circulating unsubstantiated theories.
'You cannot hate them enough,' Laurence Fox, an actor and far-right political agitator, posted on the social site X soon after the reports of the episode broke. In a follow-up post, he wrote, 'what is coming next is inevitable.'
Other right-wing political figures were more cautious. Nigel Farage, the leader of the populist anti-immigrant Reform U.K. party, posted that he was 'horrified to see the scenes in Liverpool,' though he described it as a 'disturbing attack.'
The police have yet to disclose a motive or further details about the driver. While they are not treating it as terrorism, they have not speculated about why he plowed into pedestrians. Other law enforcement officials described the disclosure of the man's race and nationality as highly unusual.
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Dal Babu, a former chief superintendent of the Metropolitan Police Service, told BBC 5 Live on Tuesday he believed the decision was made 'to dampen down some of the speculation on the far right, that continues on X even as we speak, that this was a Muslim extremist.' Babu said police had to balance a responsibility not to prejudice a future trial 'against the potential of public disorder.'
There were no reports of fatalities, though 27 people were being treated in hospitals. Firefighters lifted the vehicle to free four people trapped underneath it. Nearly 50 people were injured, the police said. Four of those were children, the North West Ambulance Service said. Two people -- an adult and a child -- sustained serious injuries.
By late Monday night, the online speculation had shifted to theories that it was a horrifying case of road rage. Images from moments before the driver accelerated into the crowd showed a crowd banging on the windows of his car as he reversed abruptly and then lurched forward on a crowded street.
It is the third incident of high-profile violence in the Liverpool area in four years. In 2021, a man carried an explosive device that exploded outside Liverpool Women's Hospital, killing himself and injuring a taxi driver.
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