Four of the almost 50 victims injured when a van drove through fans celebrating Liverpool FC at a victory parade in the UK are “very, very ill,” the city’s mayor said Tuesday — admitting he can only hope “they pull through.”
The van driver, only identified as a 53-year-old white British man, is in custody after the vehicle was seen ramming through crowds as at least a million fans packed Liverpool to celebrate the team’s Premier League trophy victory this season.
Some 20 victims were treated at the scene while 27 were rushed to local hospitals, including children, police said late on Monday, while stressing it is not being eyed as terrorism.
Of those hospitalized, there are “still four people who are very, very ill in [the] hospital,” Liverpool City Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram told the BBC. “We are hoping, of course, that they pull through.”
At least a million people had descended on the 10-mile parade route that wound through Liverpool city center as the victorious players and staff paraded in an open-top bus carrying the Premier League trophy.
The streets were especially packed because Monday was a holiday and the last time Liverpool won the league was during the COVID pandemic, when celebrations were not allowed.
The van driver is believed to have followed an ambulance into a street that had been closed to traffic, Reuters reported.
It appeared that he panicked once he realized he was in the crowd and people began banging on his car, witnesses said. The driver sounded his horn and reversed before accelerating forward, according to other witnesses at the scene.
Shocking video shared on social media shows bodies being flung into the air and dragged under the wheels as the vehicle appears to turn directly into the crowds.
As the vehicle came to a halt, furious fans descended on it and began smashing the windows as cops battled to prevent them from reaching the driver.
Cops were quick to describe the man they arrested at the scene as a “53-year-old white British man from the Liverpool area,” just two hours after the tragedy.
Police and city authorities admitted they did this to try to cool tensions and dispel rumors swirling on social media that the incident was an Islamist attack.
Merseyside Police, which covers Liverpool, was the same force that oversaw the response to the murder of three young Taylor Swift fans in the nearby town of Southport last summer.
The horrific slaughter of three young girls prompted days of rioting after it was claimed that the killer was Muslim.
Police were told not to release information that the attacker, Axel Rudakubana, came from a Christian family, and in the immediate aftermath, some of the disorder targeted mosques and hotels where asylum seekers were staying.
Monday’s decision to describe the attacker was “unprecedented,” former Metropolitan Police chief superintendent Dal Babu told the BBC.
“It was Merseyside Police who didn’t give that information with the Southport horrific murders of those three girls, and the rumors 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,” he added, saying that Merseyside Police had learned lessons from the Southport attack.
“That was one of my first concerns, that we needed to get the story out quickly,” Mayor Rotherham told the BBC.
“If there’s a vacuum, we know there are some elements that will try to inflame the situation and to create that speculation and to put misinformation out there,” he added.
