Terrorism not suspected in London museum car crash

Police respond to a car crash at a London museum

(Image credit: Henry Vaughan/The Associated Press)

last updated 7 October 2017

Several people were injured, none seriously, when a car drove into pedestrians on a sidewalk outside London's Natural History Museum Saturday afternoon. Authorities say they do not believe this to be an incident of terrorism, though the U.K.'s terror threat is currently set to "severe."

"Inquiries to establish the circumstances and motive are under way," London police reported on Twitter, and Downing Street says Prime Minister Theresa May is "being kept up to date on events." One person was detained at the scene, but reports differ on whether he was actually arrested.

"I could see a car diagonally across the road, looking like it was going into one of the boulders on the side of the road, and I could see a crowd of people around what was clearly one or two people on the pavement," said a BBC reporter, Chloe Hayward, who happened to be at the scene. "We have had lots of police coming onto the scene, helicopters above, and I can see an ambulance which is definitely having someone put in, but it isn't clear how bad that injury is."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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