There was a horrific knife attack in East Street Market in South London yesterday that took place just after the two minute silence for Remembrance Sunday. According to some of the reports I’ve seen an African looking man went berzerk with a knife at the market with the result that one person ended up stabbed to death and two others were hospitalised with injuries.

The police are not at this stage treating this as terrorism and instead are treating it as the normal sort of run of the mill case, sadly now quite common in London, where a person with catastrophic mental illness goes on the rampage with a weapon. We’ve seen lots of these sorts of cases over the last decade or so which means that this possibility should not be discounted. We do after all have a situation where mental health treatment on the National Health Service is so patchy as to be virtually non-existent.

But there’s some evidence that this narrative by the authorities, even if truthful is not being believed. Following on from the Southport Atrocity in which three young girls were murdered and other children and adults were injured by knifeman and where the accused has only recently had terrorism charges laid against him, the public are starting to assume that the authorities are lying to them after attacks such as the one that took place at East Street Market.

Now to be fair to the police it might take some time to ascertain whether there was a terrorist motive in a particular crime. This is partly because the evidence to make this judgement might not become available until after the computers and other devices and property of the accused is properly searched and examined.

But there are people coming forward with claims that challenge the ‘nothing to do with terrorism’ narrative and one of them can be found on the X account of political commentator David Atherton. Now I have no way of confirming or denying what Mr Atherton’s source is claiming. This could be someone stirring the pot and using the offices of Mr Atherton’s account in order to do so. However, this information is now out there in the public domain and in the public eye so I thought that it might be a good idea on the grounds of giving people the fullest information possible to repost it here and comment on it.

Mr Atherton’s correspondent said:

“Hi David, The knife attack this morning at East Street Market happened just after the 2 min silence for Remembrance Sunday. “The guy was shouting “Allahu Akbar” as he started attacking people. He severed an Asian man’s arm off. A stall holder managed to stop him. “In my opinion, this is without a doubt a terror attack. Stabbing 3 random people is causing terror no matter the motive. “Please keep anonymous.” The man appears to be of African heritage. My source adds after my questions: “My family all live there, I was born and raised there. It was put on my family group this morning when it happened.” It looks like another cover up.

From what the Mr Atherton’s correspondent is saying it doesn’t appear that this person was a direct witness to this incident but heard about it second hand via a family social media group. I was taught when I was a court reporter to not take hearsay as fact as the person repeating what they’ve heard may not be repeating exactly what happened or may be repeating wrong information. The correspondent may well have come to his viewpoint due to stuff being misheard by first hand witnesses. But in the current circumstances with a rise in Islamic terrorism and a rise in the number of ‘lone wolf’ attackers who were self-radicalised, it’s not altogether impossible to believe that this might be yet another terror attack. It may even be a combination of mental illness and Islam where someone who is mentally ill goes on a rampage with Islam being the mad person’s excuse or reasoning for their actions. After all it’s not as if we’ve not seen cases with such elements before.

If there is any terrorist aspect to this case then the police need to come clean about this as soon as possible. It was not being forthcoming enough with information such as saying that the Southport Atrocity suspect was ‘Welsh’ and nothing to do with Islam or terrorism, that led in large part to the furore following the Southport Atrocity. The failure to give the public timely information about the Southport Atrocity case contributed a very great deal to distrust in the police. Without accurate and truthful information about the case the public rumour mill went into overdrive with the effects that we all saw on the streets of Britain just after the Southport Atrocity occurred.

We are rapidly approaching a situation in the United Kingdom where the police say something following an incident like this about potential motivations of the accused and the public reply with the words ‘you are lying’. If that situation where the public automatically think the police are lying following attacks like this is to be changed, then the police need to release as much information as they legally can about attacks of this nature in order to persuade the public to believe the police.

We will not know the full story of this case until it comes to trial in the Crown Court. We will then be able to understand whether the East Street attack was terrorism, mental illness or a combination of both. But at present the rumour mill is already starting to swiftly turn and only the police by means of information transparency can slow that rumour mill down.