Van Slams Into Pedestrians Near London Mosque Leaving "Number Of Casualties", Driver Arrested

originally posted by: oldcarpy
a reply to: teapot

The report on Sky seems pretty clear about what he said.

And what about him blowing kisses to the crowd when he was taken away by Police?

I think we can apply abductive reasoning and the Duck Test here.

I think you mean "reductive" reasoning (LOL). Have you a link to video of him blowing kisses when he was taken away by the police? I've looked all over Youtube for videos of the van driver, and I can only find one with him being held behind a police van while the useless plod spend ages trying to find a key to open the door, while the muslims all around are shouting at him angrily.

Why is nobody here going through my points one by one and either rebutting them, or accepting them as facts? The media will continually refer to this incident as an 'anti-muslim terrorist attack' or words to that effect, so that they can make out that muslims are also the victims of terrorism from non-muslims - they are not.

And where is the CCTV footage? I hear now that the man who had collapsed in the street has died because of injuries caused by being hit by the van. This in no way proves that it was a deliberate (and therefore a 'terrorist') 'attack'. Everything I have written previously still stands. The van driver could have been drunk, or recovering from having been drunk the night before, he could have been lost and thought he was turning left into a normal road - and roads don't normally have people lying in the middle of them, and he could have hit the crowd entirely by accident. Just look at everything I've written - the LOCATION of the incident, when the mosque is 500 yards up the road, and so on.

Why are there still no descriptions of the injuries of the nine people that are in hospital?
Watch this video at 2:50 for a nice close up of the front of the van: www.youtube.com...
No visible damage at all from that video (although as I said previously, you can see a small dent in the bonnet in the photo that is in the BBC article I linked to in my first or second post.)
And of course, this entire thread has been moved far down the front page of ATS so that people can't see it...

a reply to: JohnThomas

Looks like a drunk to me. Or he's the worst killer of all time. Only one dead?

a reply to: JohnThomas

No, I meant what I said - "abductive reasoning". As in the three types of logical reasoning - deduction, induction and abduction.

You can look it up and at the same time you could look up "sub judice" then you might have an answer to most of your questions.

a reply to: JohnThomas


CCTV footage for starters?

a reply to: oldcarpy

Reporters relying on hearsay evidence to gather information and write their reports, ok.

Courts? Reading through your replies to the Thread, it appears many of us that no longer have trust in the justice system here in UK, can be vindicated that the legal profession make assumptive judgements, decide amongst themselves who is guilty of what and are not interested in getting to the truth at all.

a reply to: teapot


I don't think you understand what hearsay evidence actually means. What is wrong with a reporter reporting what he was told by an eye witness? That is not hearsay.

The legal profession in this country do what? Not in my experience, they don't. You are just talking rubbish. Again.

Apparently he has just been charged with murder and attempted murder.

originally posted by: oldcarpy
a reply to: JohnThomas


CCTV footage for starters?

And you can't rebut anything else I wrote then? And nobody else here can? Unbelievable.
Most of what I wrote is simple observations of the physical layout of the road, etc. which make it seem very unlikely indeed that a 'terrrorist' would choose to attack people in that specific location. Nobody has provided us with the video of the van driver allegedly laughing (or whatever it was) while being taken away by the police. Nobody has bothered (especially YOU) to discuss anything I wrote, apart from the lack of CCTV. So you have nothing to say about anything else I wrote, in spite of the fact that this ACCIDENT is going to forever more be referred to as a 'white nationalist terrorist attack' or 'racist terrorist attack' against muslims, when there is no evidence at all that this is what happened.
I have just read several news reports about the fact that the van driver has been charged with murder, and all of them go into great detail to tell you what he was THINKING at the time of the incident. How can anybody know what he was THINKING?
The muslim who claimed that the van driver said "I want to kill all muslims" - he is obviously lying. Whoever it was who claimed that the van driver had a KNIFE was also lying, yet this was reported by the media. And so on.
So oldcarpy is basically saying "don't look at what John Thomas said, don't even discuss it, just ignore it"...

originally posted by: oldcarpy
Apparently he has just been charged with murder and attempted murder.

They're going to have a job proving any of that when the CCTV is played in court, aren't they...
They have to PROVE exactly what he was thinking at the time of the incident, which they can't. Has he been breathalysed? Was he drunk? Why did he drive all the way to LONDON to allegedly kill muslims when there are loads of them in Wales? Any answers, oldcarpy?

You couldn't read the driver's mind via CCTV, but if on the other hand the CCTV showed him running someone down, then peering out of his driver's side window, and then reversing backwards and forwards over that person's body, then you'd be in a strong position to argue that he intended to do what he was doing. This is a hypothetical example, I'm not stating that the suspect in this instance behaved in the way described.

As for why he drove all the way from Wales, the choice of destination speaks for itself.

Finsbury Park Mosque has almost become synonymous with Islamist terrorism in the UK, thanks to the attendance there of (among others) shoebomber Richard Reid and that guy from the 9/11 plot whose name I can never remember, something like Zebediah Moussaka. Plus, one of the biggest names in the tabloids for many years was a preacher there - Abu Hamza, whose photograph is still something of an 'icon of evil' to this very day.

(I should point out that Finsbury Park Mosque has had a thorough clean-out of extremists since the height of the War on Terror nonsense, and these days is a respectable place of worship - but it still has a bad reputation, and that clearly factored in the attacker's mind).

I doubt you could get more 'bang for your buck' by confining your drunken van-crashing to within Welsh borders!

a reply to: JohnThomas

I already said that the earlier reports of multiple attackers, knives, anti Muslim shouts etc were false.
Add to that the disgust at the politicising or outright propaganda that this will be spun into.
Personally speaking I don't think we will ever get to the truth with this one now.

Those with an interest will have dug in and entrenched what they want this to be by now. I'm going to wait and see what happens when he gets to court for final sentencing.
The responses to that will be worth keeping an eye on.

See my earlier post about 24 hour live news. Its understandable that people will speculate and its hard to undo a lot of what comes out in that window between what appears to have happened and what actually happened.

Either way, its not looking good and that night will no doubt be viewed historically as a sorry affair all round. I haven't got much more to say about it really.

You've done a good job rounding up your take on it and you'll get no argument from me.

originally posted by: audubon
You couldn't read the driver's mind via CCTV, but if on the other hand the CCTV showed him running someone down, then peering out of his driver's side window, and then reversing backwards and forwards over that person's body, then you'd be in a strong position to argue that he intended to do what he was doing. This is a hypothetical example, I'm not stating that the suspect in this instance behaved in the way described.

As for why he drove all the way from Wales, the choice of destination speaks for itself.

Finsbury Park Mosque has almost become synonymous with Islamist terrorism in the UK, thanks to the attendance there of (among others) shoebomber Richard Reid and that guy from the 9/11 plot whose name I can never remember, something like Zebediah Moussaka. Plus, one of the biggest names in the tabloids for many years was a preacher there - Abu Hamza, whose photograph is still something of an 'icon of evil' to this very day.

(I should point out that Finsbury Park Mosque has had a thorough clean-out of extremists since the height of the War on Terror nonsense, and these days is a respectable place of worship - but it still has a bad reputation, and that clearly factored in the attacker's mind).

I doubt you could get more 'bang for your buck' by confining your drunken van-crashing to within Welsh borders!

Well then you aren't thinking very hard. Twenty past midnight, driving into a side street with bollards within twenty yards of the entrance = worst place to try to run down large number of muslims...

Whereas - a pavement in front of a large mosque in Wales = best place and easiest to get to, to run down a large number of muslims. Your argument is ridiculous. Why did he wait until twenty past midnight to launch his 'attack'? Are muslims from Finsbury Park Mosque somehow 'worse' than muslims from Wales, to a Welshman who allegedly 'hates muslims'? (Or 'wants to kill all muslims')?

The thing is, that applying rigorous logical processes to analysing the actions of stupid people tends to produce weird results. People do pointless things, make poor decisions, act on misguided beliefs, concoct doomed plans, over-react to trivial annoyances, etc, etc, all the time. When we see these people behaving so stupidly, we are at a loss to understand them.

Remember that nut who flew a single-prop Cessna into the IRS offices in 2010? Similar sort of thought-process. He thought he was pulling off his own private 9/11. Anyone could see it was laughable - except him.

originally posted by: JohnThomas

originally posted by: oldcarpy
Apparently he has just been charged with murder and attempted murder.

They're going to have a job proving any of that when the CCTV is played in court, aren't they...
They have to PROVE exactly what he was thinking at the time of the incident, which they can't. Has he been breathalysed? Was he drunk? Why did he drive all the way to LONDON to allegedly kill muslims when there are loads of them in Wales? Any answers, oldcarpy?

No one knows him in London, just sayin. lol.

I haven't heard anything more on the news about this.

It dropped out of the news pretty quick. Why, if it was a terror attack against muslims by a white guy?

a reply to: JohnThomas

www.foxnews.com...

originally posted by: audubon
The thing is, that applying rigorous logical processes to analysing the actions of stupid people tends to produce weird results. People do pointless things, make poor decisions, act on misguided beliefs, concoct doomed plans, over-react to trivial annoyances, etc, etc, all the time. When we see these people behaving so stupidly, we are at a loss to understand them.

Remember that nut who flew a single-prop Cessna into the IRS offices in 2010? Similar sort of thought-process. He thought he was pulling off his own private 9/11. Anyone could see it was laughable - except him.

WTF? "the actions of stupid people". So you can't actually be bothered to rebut anything I wrote in my original two posts, I see. Like "Point 1 is incorrect because... etc."

As for "Similar sort of thought-process"... you are claiming that you can READ PEOPLE'S MINDS, and also that you have a TIME MACHINE and can go back in time to read people's minds... okay...

In other words, you've added nothing whatsoever to this thread.

originally posted by: LABTECH767
a reply to: JohnThomas

www.foxnews.com...

LOL at "not terror-related". What does that even mean? What does "terror" even mean, nowadays?

Is anybody here capable of writing more than two or three sentence replies?
Is anybody here capable of even understanding the very BASIC arguments I wrote in my original two posts, and discussing them, whether you agree with them or not?

originally posted by: Tulpa
a reply to: JohnThomas

I already said that the earlier reports of multiple attackers, knives, anti Muslim shouts etc were false.
Add to that the disgust at the politicising or outright propaganda that this will be spun into.
Personally speaking I don't think we will ever get to the truth with this one now.

Those with an interest will have dug in and entrenched what they want this to be by now. I'm going to wait and see what happens when he gets to court for final sentencing.
The responses to that will be worth keeping an eye on.

See my earlier post about 24 hour live news. Its understandable that people will speculate and its hard to undo a lot of what comes out in that window between what appears to have happened and what actually happened.

Either way, its not looking good and that night will no doubt be viewed historically as a sorry affair all round. I haven't got much more to say about it really.

You've done a good job rounding up your take on it and you'll get no argument from me.

Thankyou, Tulpa, for an intelligent response, that actually discusses some of the relevant facts.

a reply to: JohnThomas

Life is short, I'm enjoying the weekend, and (this is the important bit) you are not an examiner and I have not failed some kind of test. But in the interests of full and open debate, here are responses to each of the enumerated points you made earlier on this thread.

Point 1:

There is no CCTV of the event, even though CCTV cameras are clearly visible on Google Streetview, pointing directly at the entrance to Whadcoat Street, where the incident occurred.
The media isn’t mentioning CCTV anywhere. Why is that? Would they not mention it and hope that it would reveal how the attack happened?

There is a live suspect in custody, so any relevant CCTV recordings will have been gathered by the police investigation. It cannot be published while a trial is still pending (Contempt of Court Act 1981, since you asked).

Point 2:

The one photo of the van that we have seen, which shows the front of it, stopped in front of bollards, shows only a very small dent in the bonnet. No blood, no damaged windscreen. If the driver was attempting to kill muslims, he would have driven into the cul de sac (Whadcoat Street is a very short cul de sac with metal bollards at the end) at high speed, and then crashed into the bollards.

This boils down to the fact that what you think the incident should look like disagrees with what it actually looked like. Irrelevant.

Point 3:

There is no description anywhere of the injuries suffered by the nine people who were taken to hospital. There is no proper media footage of the scene of the incident, only lots of really poor quality mobile phone footage of the driver and the crowds. Why are we not being told about the nature and extent of the injuries?

Because medical treatment is confidential and private. This is completely normal.

Point 3:

The man who died was already dying of a heart attack after collapsing in the road, which is why there were people around him, in the middle of the road, when the van drove into it, and thus into them. There is no proof whatsoever that the van even hit the dying man, so why is the entire media saying that the van driver killed him?

Have a think about what you're saying here. A group of men are gathered around someone who has collapsed in the street, but you think a van that hits that group somehow avoids the man they were surrounding? In any event, what the media says doesn't necessarily reflect what official investigations (police, coroner, trial) might find. He might have died of his heart attack before being run over. Determining what killed him is a pathologist's job.

Point 4:

The van driver allegedly said “I want to kill all muslims” as he was being dragged out of the van by muslims who were beating him up! The person who claimed the van driver said this was a muslim who was holding him down on the ground. If you were being beaten up and held down by a large group of muslims, would you say to them “I want to kill all muslims” while they are beating you up? (snip)

I would if I wanted to provoke them into killing me, yes. This is probably what the attacker was trying to achieve, in order to stir up more Islamophobic attacks. That's my inference, the truth will probably come out at trial.

Point 5:

The media repeatedly used the term “worshippers” to describe muslims who were walking along a road at least 500 yards from a mosque. Would they describe Christians who were walking along a road at least 500 yards from a church as “worshippers”

Frankly, so what.

Point 6:

Why would the van driver have driven all the way to London to attack muslims, when there are plenty of mosques in Wales he could have targetted? And he could have actually targetted the front of a mosque, instead of a random group of people 500 yards away.

I have actually addressed this already in an earlier quote. Finsbury Park Mosque is nationally infamous as a (former) hotbed of Islamist terrorism. Also, to be cynical, you're more likely to get on the TV news if you attack somewhere in London rather than in the village of Llarregub, Vale of Glamorgan.

Point 7:

Why would the van driver have chosen twenty past midnight to attack a group of random people down a side street, whom he couldn’t possibly have seen during his approach, if he was speeding, as is alleged? (Or at least, he would only have seen them for a split second before deciding to drive into them.) Bear in mind there is a bus lane all down the left hand side of Seven Sisters Road, and it is a one way street.

I can't answer this because I am not familiar with the area. But, given that a small crowd had gathered around someone who had collapsed, this probably presented the attacker with a neat set of 'skittles' (forgive the image) and explains why he acted at that moment rather than another.

Point 8:

From the aerial photograph in the article above, we can see that the incident was not even in sight of the mosque! This is the only aerial photograph I've seen in any article about this incident, and it shows that the driver was nowhere near the mosque - why wouldn't he have driven into the area in front of the mosque, 500 yards up the road, to maximise the number of victims?

The crowd was leaving a nearby hall, not the mosque, so this question is irrelevant. The attacker chose an obvious crowd.

Continued in next post...

... Continued from previous post.


Point 9:

Look at the photo of the van in the article above - look how short a distance the van got up Whadcoat Street – because there are bollards! Isn't that the worst place to try to drive into a group of people?

This could explain why he didn't manage to kill anyone (or managed to kill only one person, who was lying in the road, this bit is uncertain). No-one said that terrorists are geniuses, and in fact if anything the opposite tends to be true.

Point 10:

The article says the van ‘mounted the pavement’ – “It was then that a white van came down the street, mounted the pavement and drove into people.” – but it isn’t “mounting the pavement’ if it’s driving into Whadcoat Street. Otherwise, every car that drove into that street would be considered to be “mounting the pavement”.

Journalists make mistakes all the time, particularly during a major news story when things have to be reported quickly and things get confirmed, denied, and modified. Is this really important?

Point 11:

This is the first time I’ve even seen the name ‘Whadcoat Street’ in any article about this. Why isn’t the media telling us the name of the street in which the incident occurred, in every article? Because it’s 500 yards from the mosque, that’s why.

I dunno. Are the media in on this plot, too? Or were journalists more concerned with the action than the precise details of the scenery? Why is anyone meant to care about this point of yours anyway, come to that?

Point 12:

Presuming the black car and silver car in the picture were already there before the van got there, he managed to avoid hitting the black car, so how fast could he have been going as he turned left into Whadcoat Street?

What if your presumption is wrong?

Point 13:

Why would he not have rammed into the hoardes of people who would have been outside the mosque, which is over 500 yards down the road? Why would he target a side road where he would have no idea who was standing there, and would have no reason to expect people to be standing in the middle of the road – bear in mind they claimed he was speeding down the road and then did a hard left turn into the side road.

This is something only the attacker knows, and will come out during the trial. Just because you can't make sense of it doesn't mean that it is nonsensical.

Point 14:

“The terror attack happened shortly before 00:20 BST on Monday, 19 June, when the vehicle mounted the pavement outside Muslim Welfare House - which is also a community centre - on Seven Sisters Road.” But the very photo they show beneath this sentence shows that it wasn’t “outside Muslim Welfare House”, it was 200 yards up the road.

I think this is irrelevant pedantry.

Point 15:

And most importantly of all – it occurred at just before 00:20, just after midnight! How many muslims do you expect to be ‘leaving a mosque’ (that is the implication that the lying media has been spinning ever since this happened – describing the ‘victims’ as ‘worshippers’ repeatedly – are Christians who are walking down a street after going to see a show at midnight, classed as ‘worshippers’ – ever?)

It was during Ramadan, a holy month in which Muslims are up and about at all hours, and say prayers in the middle of the night. This is completely normal. If you'd been reading the papers lately, you might have caught a story about a tower block catching fire. In those stories, you will find details about how the alarm was raised in the early morning by Muslims who were awake at that time purely because of Ramadan prayers.

Point 16:

So how long is the gap between prayers? Half an hour? Ten minutes? Are muslims leaving the mosque (which is 500 yards away from Whadcoat Street) and walking home, and then turning straight round to walk back to the mosque?

I think prayers during Ramadan are fairly (!) frequent, but don't see how the interval is relevant. If you are up all night, saying prayers regularly, then you're probably not going to go home in between (unless you are really knackered). So hanging about with your pals in or around the place where you're going to be praying in a little while makes sense.