LONDON — Residents of the southeast London neighborhood where a British soldier was slaughtered in a terrorist attack Wednesday reacted with unease at what the incident meant for immigrant relations.
Prime Minister David Cameron called the killing by two men wielding knives and meat cleavers a “betrayal of Islam” and warned against “knee-jerk responses.” In Woolwich, the area where the attack occurred outside an army barracks, residents said they were concerned at the effect it would have on a changing neighborhood.
“We are worrying so much about the problem of radicalism,” Saeed Omer, 44, a Muslim originally from Somalia, said in an interview. “Our communities will suffer.”
Politicians including Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson urged calm after ITV News showed footage of one of the suspects, a man with his hands covered in blood and holding a knife, saying: “We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Your people will never be safe.”
London’s Metropolitan Police, which is investigating the attack, responded to “small incidents of minor disorder” in Woolwich last night. No one was arrested or injured, Assistant Commissioner Simon Byrne said. The two suspects were shot, wounded and arrested after the attack Thursday afternoon and remain in separate hospitals.
The attack in Woolwich is the first actual, rather than planned, act of terrorism since the July 7, 2005, bombings on the London transportation network. Thursday’s incident reminds people of the dangers that remain around the world from England to the bombings at the Boston Marathon last month in the United States, Muhammad Aslam, who is Muslim, said in an interview in Woolwich.
“It puts us in a very difficult position. With my name and my family it puts us under tremendous personal and community pressure,” said Aslam, who works for the local council about 100 yards from where the attack happened. “These are very bad people in all respects and they have committed a crime against humanity and against Islam.”
Fifty-two people were killed in 2005 when four Islamist suicide bombers set off explosions on underground trains and a bus in central London during the morning rush hour.
A local Islamic group condemned the attack and asked people not to react hastily, in a statement posted on the door of their mosque about a mile from the attacks.
“We do not and will never support such evil acts, and strongly suggest that both of these men should be severely punished as criminal and not as so-called ‘Muslims’ for the crime they have committed, with full force of law,” the Greenwich Islamic Centre said in the statement. “Let the response of our nation be mature and thoughtful.”
Tony Northover, landlord of the Queens Arms pub in Woolwich, said the English Defence League, which opposes immigration, met there Wednesday night. Northover, 35, said he’s lived in the area all his life and it’s “completely changed.”
“The amount of immigrants that are here, the government expect you to just get on fine and carry on as normal, but it’s not going to happen when there’s so many different cultures and religions,” said Northover, who didn’t know the EDL was going to meet at the pub. “The mosque has been there for years. It’s got bigger because of the amount of immigrants, more and more coming in, but we’ve never had any trouble with any of them.”
Saeed, who said he is a trustee of the Islamic Centre, said he had never seen the suspects before in the area.
“This is not an act of terror, it is an act of crime,” he said. “It is nothing to do with Muslim. They are not Islamic. They do not represent Islam.”
