Last Sunday, the 8^th March, late at night police in Central London were confronted by a suspicious man who pulled out two knives and threatened the officers with violence. The knife waving nutjob, did not it appears respond to either reasonable requests from the officers to surrender his weapons or to any non-lethal means of detaining him or disarming him. He was therefore shot dead on the spot by one of the many specialist armed police officers, who now patrol Central London.

When this news came in, accompanied by the phrase ‘not terrorism related’ in news reports, my first questions were ‘so who was this nutter’ and ‘what was his motivation’? Well, some of that news is now out and the dead knifeman has been named by police as Hassan Yahya. The release of this name, a readily identified  Islamic name doesn’t just satisfy curiosity as to who the knife nutter was, but also raises doubts as to the knife nutter’s motivation. Has there ever been a comparable incident when a Muslim goes apeshit with a knife, in an area that has been previously targeted for Islamic attack and who is so out of control that he gives the police a reason to shoot him dead, where it was NOT terrorism?

It’s of little surprise to anyone that the dead Westminster knifeman was a Muslim, in fact I would have been more surprised if it was not. Because the knifeman has been identified as a Muslim, I’m not sure I truly trust the Met’s initial description of this incident as ‘not terror related’. Of course we cannot discount the possibility that Yahya was merely a mentally ill individual seeking suicide by cop. But, like so many other similar cases of this type that I’ve seen, I have a sneaking suspicion that this knifeman may have had some terrorist motivation. He be some sort of ‘clean hands’ foot-soldier, who isn’t on the radar of either the police or MI5, but he may not have been competent enough to carry out whatever attack he’d been groomed to carry out. There is also the chance that he could be some ‘special needs donkey’ (Four Lions reference there), a disturbed, highly suggestible person maybe with a mental illness whom has been convinced by a handler to carry out an attack.

At this stage it may be the case that the police do not know if there is any terror motive behind Yahya’s actions, although they should most certainly be looking into the knifeman’s background to see if any of his associates or contacts are especially ‘dodgy’. This could of course take some time especially if he is a clean hands operative and his handlers have taken care to distance themselves from him physically and otherwise. If this knifeman really is just the fall guy for a planner then it might take some time to establish this although whether the police will ever let the public know whether this is terrorism is quite another matter. I trust Met Commissioner Cressida Dick to be straight with the public to about the same degree as I would trust a random Pikey trying to sell me a second hand car, which is not at all.

Like I said earlier, this could simply be suicide by cop, but coming as it does so soon after similar incidents involving knife waving murderous Muslims going wild in the centre of London. But on the other hand it might not and might be terrorism. This case and the police’s haste to class it as a non terrorism one does make me wonder whether this is indeed a terrorist incident, but one that the Met Police are not telling the public about for some reason?