See it, say it, sorted. Everybody who uses the UK’s rail network knows the British Transport Police’s ubiquitous five-word mantra for reporting incidents on trains.
At 7.42pm on Saturday evening, the day after Halloween, the calls started coming in.
Callers gave details of a horrific mass stabbing on the 6.25pm LNER train from Doncaster in Yorkshire, travelling south to King’s Cross station in London.
Several passengers had been attacked, and the high-speed train diverted to a slower line for an unscheduled stop in Huntingdon, a small market town in Cambridgeshire, 110km north of London. LNER’s fast Azuma trains don’t normally go through there.
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British Transport Police (BTP), Cambridgeshire police officers and UK counterterror officers rushed to Huntingdon station, where panicked passengers spilled out on to the platforms. By 7.50pm, two men were in custody on suspicion of attempted murder.
After initial reports on Saturday evening that up to nine people were being treated in hospital for life-threatening injuries, BTP gave an update on Sunday.
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Ten people had been brought by ambulance on Saturday evening to local hospitals, while another person self-presented at hospital later that evening. By Sunday morning, four of the injured had been discharged, and two were still in life-threatening conditions.
Superintendent John Loveless of the BTP dealt with the question at the heart of speculation swirling around social media: was this yet another terrorist attack on Britons involving assailants wielding knives?
Britain is on edge over random mass-stabbings after several recent attacks, including one deadly attack on a Jewish synagogue in Manchester last month, which police have treated as terrorism.
So far, according to Loveless on Sunday, there was “no evidence” that Saturday’s Huntingdon train attack was a terror incident. He said the two men arrested were both born in Britain: a 32-year-old black man and a 35-year-old man of “Caribbean descent”.
The UK’s home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, also confirmed on Sunday that the attack was “not being treated as terrorism”. Counter-terror officers have now stood back from the investigation.
The swift confirmation by authorities that this appeared not to be an attack by any other terrorist group, or by asylum seekers, seemed designed to dampen tensions that are bubbling just below the surface of British society.
Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party, addressed the issue head-on in an interview with BBC shortly before police confirmed that the Huntingdon train attack was not terror-related. She said there was “something clearly wrong with [UK] society”.
“I know many people will be asking the same questions that I am thinking of right now,” she said.
“Why is it that despite so much activity, so much done, legislation to ban knives, so much investment in mental health, so much more, [that] we’re seeing more and more violence on our streets?”
She continued: “There is clearly something going wrong in our society right now ... We cannot be a country where people are innocently going about their business and facing this level of violent crime.”
National tensions over the issue emerged last year. In July 2024, Britain erupted in riots after three young girls were stabbed to death by a man who targeted a Taylor Swift-themed children’s event in Southport, about 25km north of Liverpool. A further 10 children and adults were injured.
Initial – and inaccurate – rumours in the hours after the Southport incident had speculated that a Muslim asylum seeker who arrived on a small boat was responsible. It turned out to the Cardiff-born son of African legal migrants. He had a history of worrying behaviour and there had been failures by monitoring services.
There had already been other incidents. Earlier in 2024, a Brazilian immigrant murdered a 14-year-old boy and injured four others in a random sword attack in Hainault in London. Like the Southport attacks, it was not terrorism-related, but it still shocked Britain.
Last month, a Muslim migrant from Syria launched the knife attack on the synagogue in Manchester, where he stabbed one man to death on the street outside and attempted to stab several others. Police shot him dead, as well as another Jewish man who was accidentally hit by police bullets.
Last Monday there was another apparently random mass stabbing, this time in Uxbridge, west London. A local binman was stabbed to death while two others, including a 14-year-old boy, were injured. An Afghan refugee who was granted asylum in 2022 has been charged in relation to that attack.
Ordinary knife crime decreased slightly last year in Britain. Research filed last week in the House of Commons library, using official statistics for police-reported incidents involving knives, suggested the number incidents fell 1.4 per cent in the 12 months to the end of June 2025.
However, there has been a notable rise in media reporting of high-profile random stabbings of strangers with multiple victims – the specific phenomenon seen in the Huntingdon attack.
The latest attack on the LNER train on Saturday evening has fuelled fears that mass stabbings are becoming a feature of life in Britain. Trains, in particular, are seen as vulnerable targets due to the lack of the sort of security that is typically seen at airports. BTP said its officers would be on high alert in the days and weeks ahead.
