A stabbing attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga class in England has claimed the life of another child after a nine-year-old girl died from her injuries Tuesday, bringing the death toll up to three.
Eight other children and two adults are still in the hospital, with several of them in critical condition. The two other children who died were girls ages six and seven, Merseyside Police said.
Police are questioning a 17-year-old suspect who was arrested minutes after the Monday attack in Southport.
Taylor Swift wrote in an Instagram story Tuesday that she was “completely in shock” at the “horror of yesterday’s attack.”
“These were just little kids at a dance class. I am at a complete loss for how to ever convey my sympathies to these families,” she wrote.
Witnesses described scenes “from a horror movie” as bloodied children ran from the attack just before noon on Monday.
“They were in the road, running from the nursery,” said Bare Varathan, who owns a shop nearby. “They had been stabbed, here, here, here, everywhere,” he said, indicating the neck, back and chest.
Jonathan Hayes, a local businessman, was stabbed in the leg after he heard screams from his office and ran into the dance studio to protect the children, the Telegraph reports.
“Our office is in the same building as the dance studio. He heard screams and went outside, saw the attacker, saw that he had hurt a child and tried to take the knife off him and got stabbed in the leg,” Haye’s wife Helen told the paper.
“He’s very upset that he wasn’t able to be more help. Physically he will be OK, mentally I don’t know,” she added.
Shortly after the attack, police arrested a suspect on suspicion of murder and attempted murder and seized a knife. Police said he was born in Cardiff, Wales, and had lived for years in a village about five kilometres from Southport. He has not yet been charged.
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Police said detectives are not treating Monday’s attack as terror-related and they are not looking for any other suspects.
Local people left flowers and stuffed animals in tribute at a police cordon on the street lined with brick houses in the seaside resort near Liverpool — nicknamed “sunny Southport” — whose beach and pier attract vacationers from across northwest England.
It is the latest shocking attack in a country where a recent rise in knife crime has stoked anxieties and led to calls for the government to do more to clamp down on bladed weapons, which are by far the most commonly used instruments in U.K. homicides.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the attack “horrendous and deeply shocking.”
King Charles III sent his “condolences, prayers and deepest sympathies” to those affected by the “utterly horrific incident.”
Prince William and his wife Catherine said Monday that “as parents, we cannot begin to imagine what the families, friends and loved ones of those killed and injured in Southport today are going through.”
Colin Parry, who owns a nearby auto body shop, told The Guardian that the suspect arrived by taxi.
“He came down our driveway in a taxi and didn’t pay for the taxi, so I confronted him at that point,” Parry was quoted as saying. “He was quite aggressive, he said, ‘What are you gonna do about it?’”
Parry said most of the victims appeared to be young girls.
“The mothers are coming here now and screaming,” Parry said. “It is like a scene from a horror movie. … It’s like something from America, not like sunny Southport.”
Britain’s worst attack on children occurred in 1996, when 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton shot 16 kindergarteners and their teacher dead in a school gymnasium in Dunblane, Scotland. The U.K. subsequently banned the private ownership of almost all handguns.
Mass shootings and killings with firearms are rare in Britain, where knives were used in about 40 per cent of homicides in the year to March 2023.
Although mass stabbings are also rare, several in recent years have generated fear and outrage and received a tremendous amount of attention.
In April, a man with a sword killed a 14-year-old boy walking to school in London and seriously injured four other people, including two police officers.
In Nottingham in central England in June 2022, a paranoid schizophrenic man fatally stabbed two college students walking home from celebrating the end of the school year and then killed a 65-year-old man, stole his van and used it to hit three pedestrians.
In Reading, west of London, in June 2020, a failed Libyan asylum seeker fatally stabbed three men and wounded three others.
— With files from The Associated Press and Reuters
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