Five people are now confirmed to have died in yesterday’s terror attack in Westminster and police have arrested seven people in connection with the incident. Here’s how the newspaper editorials and front pages have covered the atrocity:
The Sun says the terrorists are wrong if they think that yesterday’s attack means ‘we will be cowed’. The nation will mourn those killed but ‘normal life goes on’. But the Sun says that we must now rethink how to tackle the terror threat. Yesterday’s attacker ‘could barely have picked a more fortified place’, the paper points out. But ‘imagine how much greater the carnage might have been elsewhere’. ‘Britain must consider a huge increase in armed cops right across the country,’ the Sun argues, saying that what did not seem right before must now be considered because ‘the world has changed and with it the threat from random suicide assaults’. The Sun says that armed cops can not merely be on the streets of London – ‘We must do everything we can to guard those towns and cities’ around the country as well, the paper concludes.
‘We must deny the attackers the disproportionate reaction they seek,’ says the Daily Telegraph. But yesterday’s attack did make one thing clear: ‘sophisticated weaponry is not necessary to make the sort of impact the terrorist seeks’. Instead, ‘terrorists are increasingly using rudimentary methods of causing death and injury,’ the paper points out. And while Britain’s strict firearms laws are undoubtedly a ‘saving grace’, ‘we cannot be complacent’. While police have released no details about the attacker, the Daily Telegraph says that ‘so-called Islamic State is acting as an ideological driver for jihadist attacks in the West’. These terrorists pose a ‘real and present danger’, the paper says. Yet however we do respond, we must not give the terrorists what they want, the paper says, by over-reacting and ‘shutting down normal life even more than it has been already’.
The ‘very heart of British democracy’ has been attacked, says the Times, and ‘the trail of dead’ is a sign ‘of how the wars of the world have now encroached on our way of life.’. Yesterday’s attack – as with past terrorist atrocities in the UK – must act as a ‘a bracing reminder that we are not immune’ from ‘an apparently global pool of anger’. So what can be done? It’s easy to talk about erecting barriers, says the Times. But concrete blocks are not enough; if we want to preserve ‘our own traditions of tolerance and liberal values, we have to be ready not only to fight in concert against terror but also to address its causes’. Yesterday’s attack shows that ’there is no such thing as absolute security in an open society,’. And those looking for a ‘silver bullet’ to deal with the problem will only ever look in vain. ‘Only the relentless work’ of the security services and the ‘stoicism’ of British citizens will ensure that hate will not win.
It was ‘only a matter of time’, says the Guardian. Yet it was ‘also the hardest kind of attack to stop’; a man in a vehicle armed with ‘low-tech weaponry’ intent on doing harm. We must praise the ‘swift and courageous’ response of the security officers. Their actions – including the bravery of the fallen police officer – ‘ almost certainly saved scores of lives’, the Guardian argues – for that, ‘there can only be a wholehearted appreciation of the(ir) professionalism’. But ‘what now?’, asks the paper. However we respond, we must remember that this is ‘not an act of war.’ And yesterday’s atrocity ‘must not be allowed to divide us one from the other’.
Here are a selection of newspaper front pages from around the world:
The Wall Street Journal
Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine:
Italy’s Corriere Della Sera:
France’s Le Figaro:
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