On Thursday, May 25, British armed police apprehended a man after a car was driven into the gates of Downing Street, where Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and several other prominent UK officials live.
A guy was arrested at the scene “on suspicion of criminal damage and dangerous driving,” the Metropolitan Police stated in a statement on Friday, May 26. “There are no reports of any injuries.”
It was unclear whether the crash was intentional, and police said they were investigating the circumstances. They went on to say that the incident was not “being treated as terror-related.”
Sunak was at his office at the time, according to the Associated Press.
A video released on social media shows a silver hatchback car driving slowly over Whitehall, the major thoroughfare in London’s government quarter, towards Downing Street’s gates.
The gates to Downing Street are always guarded by armed and unarmed police personnel.
Soon later, video showed the automobile with its trunk open against the tall metal gates, and numerous police officers investigating it, taking items from the trunk and placing them in evidence bags.
The Downing Street gates were built in response to threats from Irish Republican Army terrorists in 1989. In 1991, the IRA launched three mortars into the street, one of which burst in Prime Minister John Major’s backyard as he was leading a Cabinet meeting inside No. 10. Minor injuries were sustained by three police officers and one civil servant.
In 2017, an extremist inspired by the Islamic State organisation drove a car into four people on Westminster Bridge before stabbing a police officer to death outside Parliament.
