London Bridge & Hague 2019 Incidents

November 29th is the anniversary of the Partition Plan of November 29, 1947, when The United Nations General Assembly approved a plan for the partition of Palestine.

2019 Incident

London Bridge

On this date in 2019, a "major incident" has taken place on the London Bridge. Reports indicate a number of people are believed to have been injured after a stabbing at London Bridge, police have said. One account says five have died ~ although this is totally unconfirmed.

The Met Police said they were called to a stabbing at a premises near the bridge just before 14:00 local time. They have declared this a "terrorist incident."

The force said it had killed a suspect, a man. The male killed was convicted terrorist Usman Khan, 28. Two citizens of London were killed.

London Ambulance Service has declared a "major incident". British Transport Police said London Bridge station was currently closed and no trains would be stopping there.

Police have advised people near the scene to follow directions from officers on the ground.

The prime minister tweeted he was being updated on the incident and wanted to thank police and all emergency services for their response.

Home Secretary Priti Patel also tweeted that she was "very concerned" about the incident.

The suspect had a "hoax" bomb jacket on his body.

Heroes credited were tour guide Thomas Gray, 24; Fishmongers' Hall chef Luckasz originally from Poland; convicted murderer James Ford out on day release; and other Small Car Big City tour guide Stevie Hurst.

Fishmongers' Hall was hosting a prisoner rehabilitation conference organised by the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University. Usman Khan, who had on an ankle tracking bracelet, was attending the conference and a speaker.
The Narwhal Tusk

Polish chef Luckasz at the Fishmongers' Hall took a narwhal tusk off the wall to fight the London Bridge attacker. He is quite visible in photographs and videos of the incident. Source.

The narwhal (Monodon monoceros), or narwhale, is a medium-sized toothed whale that possesses a large "tusk" from a protruding canine tooth. It lives year-round in the Arctic waters around Greenland, Canada, and Russia. It is one of two living species of whale in the family Monodontidae, along with the beluga whale. The narwhal males are distinguished by a long, straight, helical tusk, which is an elongated upper left canine. The narwhal was one of many species described by Carl Linnaeus in his publication Systema Naturae in 1758.

Its name is derived from the Old Norse word nár, meaning "corpse", in reference to the animal's greyish, mottled pigmentation, like that of a drowned sailor and its summer-time habit of lying still at or near the surface of the sea (called "logging").

In Inuit legend, the narwhal's tusk was created when a woman with a harpoon rope tied around her waist was dragged into the ocean after the harpoon had struck a large narwhal. She was transformed into a narwhal, and her hair, which she was wearing in a twisted knot, became the characteristic spiral narwhal tusk.

Some medieval Europeans believed narwhal tusks to be the horns from the legendary unicorn. As these horns were considered to have magic powers, such as neutralising poison and curing melancholia, Vikings and other northern traders were able to sell them for many times their weight in gold.

Pale Horses on the Bridge

Revelation 6:8

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

The Hague

Then in the afternoon of Friday, November 29, 2019, several people were injured during a stabbing attack at a busy shopping district in the Netherlands, Dutch police said. It was the traditional "Black Friday" shopping day. There appears to be no terrorist connection in this incident.

At least three people were injured in the attack in The Hague, near the town’s historic center, Dutch police said. The suspect is still at large, officials said.

In a statement, Hague police said they were seeking a man aged 45-50 and described him using a Dutch term often applied to people of North African descent.

The attack came hours after a terrorist armed with a knife killed two pedestrians at the London Bridge. That suspect was shot dead by London cops.

2017 Incident

I posted of the earlier 2017 incidents here and here.

March 22, 2017 was the first anniversary of the 2016 terrorist attack in Brussels. Three suicide bombers killed 32 people and injured 316 in the 2016 Brussels bombings at the airport and at the Maelbeek/Maalbeek metro station.

Previously on March 22, in 2004, Ahmed Yassin, co-founder and leader of the Palestinian Sunni Islamist group Hamas, two bodyguards, and nine civilian bystanders are killed in the Gaza Strip when hit by Israeli Air Force Hellfire missiles.

On 22-3-17 in the U.K., at about 2:40 (2:37?) pm local time, a terrorist incident occurred. A woman was killed on Westminster Bridge in central London in what police are treating as a terrorist incident. Reportedly a police officer has died too. Five people are reported to have died. At least 40 people have been injured, some severely



London attack summary of June 4, 2017:

- Six dead, 49 injured and taken to hospitals

- Incident declared as terrorism

- Three suspects shot dead

- Total dead is 6 (4 pedestrians, 1 police officer, and the perpetrator Khalid Masood)

.

Photos from 2017.

"London Bridge is falling down" is the code for "The Queen has died."

Da Vinci and Violence Activate 2019

2019 begins...

Tokyo 

Tokyo

Nine people were hurt, one seriously, when a man deliberately rammed his van (shown above) into crowds celebrating New Year’s Eve along a famous Tokyo street, just after midnight, Tuesday, January 1, 2019.

With an “intent to murder,” 21-year-old Kazuhiro Kusakabe from Osaka (250 miles sw of Tokyo) drove a small vehicle into Takeshita Street in Tokyo’s fashion district of Harajuku at 10 minutes past midnight, a police spokesman said. About 20 liters of kerosene were found in the vehicle. Kusakabe told police he was acting in “retribution for the death penalty,” without giving more precise details.

Bottrop

Essen

Meanwhile, a 50-year-old German man plowed a car into a crowd in Bottrop, Germany, injuring four, then drove to Essen and hit four others in a similar fashion. The second incident occurred near the Museum Folkwang in North Rhine-Westphalia, Essen. He appeared to be targeting people from Syria and Afghanistan. One Syrian woman victim had life-threatening injuries.

Manchester

Within about the same timeframe (across time zones), on Monday, December 31, 2018, at the Manchester, U.K.'s Victoria Train Station, a stabbing of three, including a police officer, took place as people were heading to New Year's Eve celebrations. The man was heard shouting “Allah” at Victoria station.

And how will it end?

h/t MP

IKEA Attack Leaves Two Dead

As I noted in "IKEA Even Set The Clock At 2:37," the store is very aware of the Stanley Kubrick syncs and twilight language messages.

Today, an attack (after 1:00 pm local time) at a Swedish IKEA store brings the notion of "Redrum" (murder) home. (See also, "Kubrick Red: Redrum, Redrug and More.")

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Two people, a man and woman, were killed at the Ikea location. Another man, 35, was seriously injured in the knife attack at an Ikea store in Vasteras, Sweden, on August 10, 2015. The victims were "ordinary shoppers" in the kitchen accessory section, Mattias Johansson, the store manager said.

Two suspects (unnamed thus far) were arrested. One of the suspects was apprehended at the scene and the second, who was seriously injured, was picked up at a hospital a few hours later, commanding police officer Per Agren said at a press conference. How he was injured was not clear.

The suspects were two men born in 1992 and 1979 who probably knew each other, Agren said. They had no connection with the victims and the motive for the attack was not known, he said.

The Erikslund shopping center containing the store had been closed. The Ikea store in Vasteras, which is about 70 miles (115km) west of the capital Stockholm, is one of the largest in the country.

Local police said they had been called to the store around 1300 CET (0700 ET).

Västerås is one of the oldest cities in Sweden and Northern Europe. The name originates from Västra Aros, which refers to the river mouth of Svartån. The area has been populated since the Nordic Viking Age, before 1000 AD. In the beginning of the 11th century it was the second largest city in Sweden, and by the 12th century had become the seat of the bishop.

Anundshög is located just outside the City of Västerås. Anundshög is Sweden's largest burial mound. "Hög" is derived from the Old Norse word haugr meaning mound or barrow. It was built about 500 AD and is over 74 yards wide and is almost 10 yards high.

In the 18th and 19th centuries the growing of cucumber became popular, and Västerås received the nickname Gurkstaden (the Cucumber City), which it still retains today.

Attempted Murder For Slender Man

A murder based on a myth? It nearly happened. A stabbing's motive laid at the feet of a character created on the Internet? It did happen.

The Mythos

In an as-yet-unpublished article written in January 2014, my wife Jenny penned this beginning to her historical overview:

Slender Man is the hipster monster in the black suit waving his multiple appendages outside Generation Y’s bedroom window. 

Slender Man is not a new and trendy entity; it is simply the reborn face of an ancient evil, resurrected from the ashes by ever-increasing access to media, technical advances, and the bleak corners of the human mind: evil as timeless and as ubiquitous as thought itself, pre-dating language, its true origins in death, the dark, and the rolling eyeball of primal fear.

At top: Slender Man on granite, by Andy Finkle.

The Slender Man was first created on a thread in the Something Awful forum on June 8, 2009, with the objective of editing photographs to contain supernatural entities. On June 10, a forum poster with the user name "Victor Surge" contributed two black and white images of groups of children, to which he added a tall, thin spectral figure wearing a black suit. The Slender Man (sometimes written Slenderman) is described as very tall and thin with unnaturally long, tentacle-like arms (or merely tentacles), which it can extend to intimidate or capture prey.

The Attempted Murder

On May 31, 2014, two 12-year-old southeastern Wisconsin girls stabbed their 12-year-old friend nearly to death in the woods to please Slender Man, which they had learned about online. Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin, held down and stabbed a 12-year-old friend 19 times.

The two girls claimed that they wished to commit a murder as a first step to becoming "proxies" (acolytes) of the Slender Man. They had planned it for months, and finally made the attempt in a park on Saturday morning, after a slumber party. They said they learned about Slender Man on Creepy Pasta, a website about horror stories and legends. They planned to run away to the demon's forest mansion (in the Nicolet National Forest) after the slaying, the police complaint said.

The girls invited their friend to a slumber party on Friday evening, the complaint said. They planned to kill her during the night so they wouldn't have to look into her eyes, one girl told police, and then run away. They decided to put it off, but the next day, during a hide-and-seek game in a wooded park, they attacked their friend with a knife. One girl told the other to "go ballistic, go crazy," according to the court documents.

The victim began to scream that she hated them and started stumbling away, one of the girls told police.

The girls left the victim lying in the woods. She crawled to a road where a bicyclist found her lying on the sidewalk. Police arrived and she gave them the name of one of the girls who attacked her.

She was rushed into surgery, police said.

The two girls have been charged with attempted murder, and each could be sentenced to 65 years in prison each.

Name Game

Waukesha: Over the years, many believed, incorrectly, that the origin of the name of the city was an Algonquian word meaning "fox" or "little foxes," though it is actually an Anglicization of the Ojibwe proper name Waagoshag or the Potawatomi name Wau-tsha. Wau-tsha (sometimes written as Wauk-tsha or Wauke-tsha) was the leader of the local tribe at the time of the first European settlement of the area. This is confirmed by accounts of Increase A. Lapham, an early settler and historian of the region. According to Lapham, the word for "fox" was pishtaka. Cutler also told visitors about Wau-tsha, who was described as "tall and athletic, proud in his bearing, dignified and friendly."

(In appearance, Wau-tsha - without tentacles - sounds like Slender Man.)

Waukesha, Wisconsin has a long history of poltergeist, hauntings, and related stories. Also, the town was the epicenter for "phantom kangaroo" sightings in 1978, in Wisconsin.)

Nicolet National Forest: The national forest was named after Jean Nicolet (Nicollet) de Belleborne (ca. 1598 – 1 November 1642) was a French coureur des bois noted for exploring Green Bay of Lake Michigan, in what is now the U.S. state of Wisconsin. He was a known friend of Samuel De Champlain and Etienne Brule. He was attracted to Canada to participate in Samuel Champlain's plan to train young French men as explorers and traders by having them live among native Americans.

Jean Nicolet, landing at the Bay of Green Bay. 

Painted by Gavin Doyle (1852-1919) in 1910.

Morgan Geyser: Morgan is a Celtic/Irish/Welsh name meaning "dweller by the sea" and/or "fighter of the sea." Geyser literally means "a spring that throws forth intermittent jets of heated water and steam."

Anissa Weier: Anissa as a girl's name has the meaning "pure, holy; satisfaction" and is a variant of Agnes (Greek): Latin form of the Greek name Hagnes, from the feminine form of "hagnos." Weier means "dweller at the sign of the kite (a bird of prey)" and/or "dweller by a fish pond."

Fatality in Multiple Stabbings at School

UPDATE: Was the stabbings in Texas due to a gang-related fight between Hispanics and AfricanAmericans? Three suspects in custody appear to be Latinos. One dead victim has been identified as 16 year old AfricanAmerican student Joshua Broussard.


Harris County (Texas) Sheriff's Office said one person is dead after a stabbing in cafeteria at a Spring ISD high school. The incident happened at the high school on Cypresswood at North Freeway. Multiple people were stabbed, with at least one death and three injured.

It happened around 7 a.m. Wednesday, September 4, 2013, at Spring High School, in Spring, Texas.

Authorities have not released any other information about the names or continuing condition of the victim who was killed, those injured, or the suspect.

Life Flight airlifted a 16-year-old boy to Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. Officials have not said how many others were injured.

Spring High School, off Interstate 45, is a public high school located in the Spring CDP in unincorporated Harris County, Texas, United States. Spring High School, which serves grades 9 through 12, is a part of the Spring Independent School District. The school is north of Houston.

Further details will be added as they come in.

Giancola's Rampage

Anthony J. Giancola went on a rampage in Florida on Friday, June 22, 2012. When arrested by police, what he said was to the point:

Anthony J. Giancola...made this declaration, according to Pinellas Sheriff Bob Gualtieri:"You're going to be proud of me because I just killed 10 drug dealers."In Giancola's wake: four people stabbed, two fatally; two people severely beaten; and five others rammed by his car.The rampage, authorities said, began at 5100 35th Way N, a group home for the hearing impaired.Giancola, a 45-year-old former Tampa middle school principal busted for buying crack cocaine five years ago, stabbed four people there, authorities said.Justin Lee Vandenburgh, 27, and Mary Anne Allis, 59, were killed. Two others, both women, were injured.
...At 11:30 a.m., barely a mile and half away, Giancola pulled into the parking lot of Kenvin's Motel, an aged building on Haines Road with white cinderblock walls and peeling shingles and a reputation for prostitution. In two separate rooms, authorities say, Giancola found the motel's owners and beat them with a microwave.

Giancola continued on, crashing through a porch injuring two people, and purposely running over a kid on a bike, trying to back over him. All this until Giancola was arrested after K-9 dogs tracked him to a wooded area at 66th Street and 62nd Avenue North.

The carnage was widespread. The Ledger's Kameel Stanley wrote a long detailed article about the violence.

In terms of the name game, Bill Grimstad has been alerting his correspondents to an especially active "power name" of late: Nicholas. Intriguingly, in the midst of the name behind this outburst, within  Giancola exists Nicholas. 

Here is how those linkages unfold:

Giancola = Italian: from a compound personal name composed of the elements Gian (a short form of Gianni, see below) + Cola (a short form of Nicola; see Nicholas, below).

Gianni = Italian: from the personal name Gianni, a reduced form of Giovanni, Italian equivalent of John.

John = English, Welsh, German, etc.: ultimately from the Hebrew personal name yọ̄hānān ‘Jehovah has favored (me with a son)’ or ‘may Jehovah favor (this child)’. This personal name was adopted into Latin (via Greek) as Johannes, and has enjoyed enormous popularity in Europe throughout the Christian era, being given in honor of St. John the Baptist, precursor of Christ, and of St. John the Evangelist, author of the fourth gospel, as well as others of the nearly one thousand other Christian saints of the name.

Nicholas = English and Dutch: from the personal name (Greek Nikolaos, from nikān ‘to conquer’ + laos ‘people’). Forms with -ch- are due to hypercorrection (see Anthony, below). The name in various vernacular forms was popular among Christians throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, largely as a result of the fame of a 4th-century Lycian bishop, about whom a large number of legends grew up, and who was venerated in the Orthodox Church as well as the Catholic. In English-speaking countries, this surname is also found as an Americanized form of various Greek surnames such as Papanikolaou ‘(son of) Nicholas the priest’ and patronymics such as Nikolopoulos.

Anthony = English: from the personal name Anthony, Latin Antonius. See also Anton. a vernacular form of Latin Antonius in Spanish (Antón), German, Swedish, Czech (Antoň or Anton, short forms of Antonín), and several other languages. This, with its variants, cognates, and derivatives, is one of the commonest European personal names. Many of the European forms have been absorbed into this spelling as American family names; for the forms, see Hanks and Hodges 1988. Spellings with -h-, which first appear in English in the 16th century and in French (as Anthoine) at about the same time, are due to the erroneous belief that the name derives from Greek anthos ‘flower’. The popularity of the personal name in Christendom is largely due to the cult of the Egyptian hermit St. Anthony (ad 251–356), who in his old age gathered a community of hermits around him, and for that reason is regarded by some as the founder of monasticism. It was further increased by the fame of St. Anthony of Padua (1195–1231), who long enjoyed a great popular cult and who is believed to help people find lost things. Source

The city of Pinellas Park, located in central Pinellas County, Florida, was founded by Philadelphia publisher F. A. Davis, who purchased 12,800 acres (52 km²) from Mason and Benjamin Harrison supporter Hamilton Disston around 1911.

Photo at top: BayNews9

New Stabbings

The following incident occurred in West Hollywood, California, on Monday, May 3, 2010.

Has the copycat effect of the Chinese knife attacks jumped the Pacific?

"There is no witness protection program!"

There are several things to note about this new event. The alleged attacker vaguely sounds like she was in the typical type of Sirhan Sirhan trance noted for some assailants.

Other mysteries abound. Where is this woman's shirt, in her mug photos, at top? What does her makeup and appearance suggest that has not been mentioned?

A woman who stabbed and wounded four people in a busy Target store Monday afternoon [May 3, 2010] was arrested when an off-duty sheriff's deputy pulled his gun and ordered the woman to the ground as screaming shoppers ran from the building, authorities said.

Layla Trawick used a butcher's knife and a carving knife to attack the victims, using both blades at the same time — one in each hand, like in the movie "Psycho," sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said

"She was literally walking up and down the aisles slashing people," he said.

A mother holding her baby was stabbed in the neck and was taken to the hospital, where she was in stable condition, Whitmore said. The baby was unhurt and all four victims were expected to survive.

One witness said she was shopping for a Mother's Day card when she heard someone screaming, "There is no witness protection program!" as chaos broke out in the store.

"I don't know what it means but she was yelling that repeatedly and at the top of her lungs," said Katy Winn, a freelance photographer from West Hollywood. "I think I heard (the deputy) telling her to drop to the floor. That's when things got really chaotic and started falling over."

Winn said she dropped her basket and dashed across the store to the women's section, where she hid behind the clothing racks.

"From the moment the screaming started it was about five minutes. But it felt longer than that," she said.

Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy Clay Grant Jr., said he was picking up paper towels and other items when people around him started running and screaming.

Grant, 26, grabbed his duty weapon, identified himself as a sheriff's deputy and ordered the woman to drop the knives, he said. She ran away and he followed her from aisle to aisle.

Grant was wearing a white T-shirt, camouflage shorts and running shoes so several shoppers mistook him for a gunman, adding to the sense of panic, sheriff's Sgt. Josh Mankini said.

Grant followed Trawick from aisle to aisle, until she turned and waved the knives at him from above her head, he said.

But he decided not to shoot because he didn't feel his life was in jeopardy, he said. For a second time, he ordered her to drop the knives and finally she complied.

"I was more concerned about the knife, more than what she was saying," Grant said. "Her facial expression was someone who was lost, confused, didn't know exactly where they were."

Trawick was arrested with the help of private security guards and held on $1 million bail on suspicion of attempted murder. Investigators were trying to determine whether the 34-year-old Antioch woman got the knives in the store.

Speaking to reporters at a sheriff's station later, Grant was modest.

"I don't feel like I'm a hero, I just do what I'm trained to do," he said.

Whitmore said surveillance video cameras captured the stabbings, but the tape hasn't been released.

"If he wasn't there, who knows? Someone would be dead right now," Mankini said. "He had no communication with outside law enforcement. He's just some guy doing his shopping. We're pretty proud of him."

Mankini said Grant, a five-year veteran of the department, was authorized to have a weapon in the store.

The above story was carried by Yahoo News.



In another detail from the LA Times, comes this:

Entertainment journalist Allison McNamara was shopping at the store when she encountered a screaming woman in the aisle that separates the skin care and kitchen sections.

"She was yelling 'I'm bipolar. There's no witness protection program.' "

Deputies with the sheriff's West Hollywood station responded after numerous 911 calls reported a gunman at the Target, Sgt. Josh Mankini said. Officials speculate the "gunman" was probably Grant.

Our thanks to SMiles Lewis for the newstips.

3 Days, 3 Attacks

I have pointed out that in China (and Japan), due to their strict firearms laws, such countries tend to manifest their "copycat school violence" in terms of "stabbing" series. Will this current stabbing spree spread to Japan or other Asian nations?

April 2010 appears to be turning into a prime example. The media has referred to these, very openly, as "copycats." Of course, the underlying theme of these events ending in suicides or parasuicidal incidents is no surprise for readers here.










Here's is a summary of the latest news:

Five incidents in a little over a month and three attacks in three days have left at least 9 children dead in China, all by knife-wielding older males.

1) Wang Yonglai

Friday, April 30, 2010

This attack occurred in the small village of Shangzhuang, near the city of Weifang in the northern province of Shandong. Just before eight o'clock in the morning, April 30, 2010, a man named as Wang Yonglai, a local farmer, age unknown, broke through the side door of the local pre-school, according to Xinhua, the government news agency.

Armed with a hammer and carrying a can of petrol, he struck a teacher and then lashed out at five children before he picked two up, doused himself with petrol and set himself on fire. Teachers at the school managed to grab the children from him, but Wang was reported to have died. The five victims are said to be in stable condition in the local hospital and none have life-threatening injuries.

2) Xu Yuyuan, 47

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Another attack involved a knife-wielding man stabbed 29 children at a kindergarten on Thursday in Taixing of East China's Jiangsu province. Five of the children are in critical condition and the rest are stable. No deaths had been reported as of Thursday night, said Sun Yun, deputy mayor of Taixing. Two teachers and one security guard were also injured after the 9:40 am attack. Witnesses report that he taunted onlookers, daring them to stop him as he carried out his rampage.

An initial police investigation said the suspect, 47-year-old Xu Yuyuan, was an unemployed local resident who had been fired from a local insurance company in 2001.

3) Chen Kangbing, 33

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

A mentally ill teacher on sick leave for the past four years broke into a school and wounded 18 students and a teacher in southern China’s Leizhou city in Guangdong province on April 28. The man in Wednesday's attack managed to slip into the school with a group of visiting teachers, Xinhua reported. Chen Kangbing,33, had been a teacher himself. Xinhua said he suffered from mental illness and had been on sick leave since February 2006.

4) Yang Jiaqin, 40

Monday, April 12, 2010

An attack occurred on April 12, 2010, when a man hacked to death a second grader and an elderly woman with a meat cleaver, near a school in southern Guangxi, and wounded five other people, including students. Yang Jiaqin, 40, chased his victims through Xizhen village of the southern Guangxi region not long after classes ended Monday afternoon. A 7-year-old girl and the 81-year-old woman later died.

5) Zheng Minsheng, 42

Tuesday, March 23, 2010; executed, Wednesday, April 28, 2010

The Chen Kangbing attack came the same day a man was executed for stabbing eight children to death outside their elementary school last month in the southeastern city of Nanping. The attack on March 23, 2010, at around 7:20 am local time, shocked China because eight children died and the assailant had no known history of mental illness. At his trial, Zheng Minsheng, 42, said he killed because he had been upset after being jilted by a woman and treated badly by her wealthy family. He was executed by firing squad on Wednesday, April 28, just a little over a month after his crime.

2004 Attacks

These attacks have officials looking into a similar wave of knife-related violence on children that occurred in 2004. After the 2004 attack at a school in Beijing that left nine students dead, the central government ordered tighter school security nationwide. Regulations that took effect in 2006 require schools to register or inspect visitors and keep out people who have no reason to come inside.

The list of 2004 stabbings in China (which eventually spread to Japan) may be found by clicking here.

There were also stabbings in 2008, associated with the Autumn Festivals in China and Japan (see here).