{"id":3483,"date":"2005-07-23T03:03:11","date_gmt":"2005-07-23T10:03:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/index.php\/archives\/2005\/07\/23\/dealing-with-terrorists\/"},"modified":"2005-07-23T03:03:11","modified_gmt":"2005-07-23T10:03:11","slug":"dealing-with-terrorists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2005\/07\/23\/dealing-with-terrorists\/","title":{"rendered":"Dealing with terrorists"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tScotland Yard deals with a terrorist:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

At Stockwell Station, armed officers opened fire on the suspect after he hurdled a ticket barrier and raced along a platform.<\/p>\n

Police screamed at passengers to evacuate and are thought to have shot the suspect as he stumbled on to a train.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My haiku for the occasion:<\/p>\n

[Redacted out of respect for the dead man’s innocence.]<\/p>\n

Here’s an eyewitness account<\/a> from the Grauniad:<\/p>\n

\n

“An Asian guy ran on to the train. As he ran, he was hotly pursued by what I knew to be three plain-clothes police officers.<\/p>\n

“He tripped and was also pushed to the floor and one of the officers shot him five times.<\/p>\n

“One of the police officers was holding a black automatic pistol in his left hand. They held it down to him and unloaded five shots into him. I saw it. He’s dead, five shots, he’s dead.<\/p>\n

“I’m totally distraught. It was no more than five yards away from where I was sitting as I saw it with my own eyes.<\/p>\n

“As the man got on the train I looked at his face. He looked from left to right, but he basically looked like a cornered rabbit, like a cornered fox. He looked absolutely petrified.<\/p>\n

“He looked like a Pakistani but he had a baseball cap on, and quite a thickish coat. It was a coat like you would wear in winter, a sort of padded jacket.<\/p>\n

“Maybe he might have had something concealed under there, I don’t know. But it looked out of place in the weather we’ve been having.<\/p>\n

“He was quite large, big built, quite a sort of chubby guy.<\/p>\n

“I was crouched down and basically ran as fast as I could in a crouched position. I just was worried about bullets flying around.<\/p>\n

“It was just an instinctive reaction to get out – people running in all directions, looks of horror on their faces, screaming, a lot of screaming from women, absolute mayhem.<\/p>\n

“And the smell of cordite as well, the gunpowder smell, that sort of acrid sort of gunpowder smell.<\/p>\n

“It was an absolute nightmare. I’m just waiting for the pubs to open to be quite honest – nice stiff Scotch.<\/p>\n

“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I saw them kill a man basically. I saw them shoot a man five times.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Brits don’t fool around.<\/p>\n

CORRECTION: It wasn’t Scotland Yard that shot the terror dude, it was the London Metropolitan Police. Sorry for the mistake. See CNN for more details<\/a>.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: It turns out that the suspect, for all his suspicious behavior, wasn’t actually involved with the terrorists. That doesn’t mean I fault the police for shooting him, because the climate of fear the terrorists created was the real culprit. That’s what terror does, after all.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scotland Yard deals with a terrorist: At Stockwell Station, armed officers opened fire on the suspect after he hurdled a ticket barrier and raced along a platform. Police screamed at passengers to evacuate and are thought to have shot the suspect as he stumbled on to a train. My haiku for the occasion: [Redacted out … Continue reading “Dealing with terrorists”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-Ub","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}