Man arrested after stabbing in London’s Leicester Square; 11-year-old girl in hospital

LONDON – British police said they arrested a man after a stabbing in London’s Leicester Square, which left an 11-year-old girl needing hospital treatment and a 34-year-old woman with minor injuries.

The police said the incident in the central London square, an area popular with tourists, was not being treated as terror-related.

Britain’s police forces remain on high alert

after days of riots earlier in August,

which were triggered by false online posts wrongly identifying the suspected killer of three girls in northern England as an Islamist migrant.

The injuries of the 11-year-old victim were not life threatening, the police said, adding that she was being treated in hospital.

There were no other outstanding suspects, police said.

The episode came exactly two weeks after

a deadly knife attack in Southport, near Liverpool

, that led to the death of three young girls and injured eight other children and two adults.

In the days after the stabbings in Southport, false information about the identity of the attacker, including that he was a migrant in the country without legal permission, spread rapidly online and ignited a series of violent riots around Britain.

In Leicester Square, an area in front of a shop called TWG Tea was cordoned off by blue and white police tape at 1.30pm, with a handful of police officers positioned at the scene.

There were visible blood stains and a discarded baseball cap in the cordoned-off zone.

A man working as security in the tea shop said he witnessed the attack and intervened after a young girl and a woman he believed to be her mother were injured.

Police officers then whisked the witness away for further questioning.

The BBC identified the employee as a 29-year-old named Abdullah. He told the BBC and the Press Association news agency that he tackled the attacker, kicking the knife away before he and a few others held the man down until police arrived.

Two hours after the attack, hundreds of tourists continued to mill about the square. Shoppers at the Lego and M&M’s stores, which both frequently have long lines of people waiting to enter, craned their necks to see what was happening as a helicopter circled overhead. REUTERS, NYTIMES