Local police did not mention Amess’s name, but confirmed that the officers “were called due to a stabbing” shortly after 12:05 (11:05 GMT). “A man was detained … and we are not looking for anyone else,” he reported on Twitter.
Sky News and BBC channels identified the victim, stabbed “multiple times”, as the 69-year-old politician, a member of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s party, who was receiving his constituents at a church in his constituency in Leigh-on-Sea. . The attacker’s motive was unknown at the moment.
Paul Gardiner, a 41-year-old barber, whose establishment is about 250 meters from the scene of the attack, explained the police deployment to AFP.
“There are a couple of helicopters flying over the place and there was an ambulance,” he said. “I was driving to work and I parked around 12:30, there were many police cars driving there,” he added, assuring that two and a half hours later the situation had normalized.
Another witness, identified only as Anthony, told LBC radio: “I saw someone being pulled out of the building and into the back of a police car.” “Apparently (the deputy) was stabbed several times,” he added.
The political reactions were immediate, in a country marked by the murder in the middle of the street in 2016 of the Europhile deputy Jo Cox, a week before the Brexit referendum, at the hands of a neo-Nazi sympathizer.
“Horrible and deeply shocking news,” Labor opposition leader Keir Starmer tweeted.
For his part, former British Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron lamented this “alarming and worrying news.”
Johnson, his party and his government have not reacted yet.
“The Jo Cox Foundation is horrified to hear the news of the attack on Sir David Amess. We think of him, his family and his loved ones in this distressing time,” tweeted the institution created in memory of the Labor MP who was murdered at the 41 years.
The attack on Cox, a staunch defender of British membership of the European Union and the cause of refugees, shocked the United Kingdom, in a context of strong tension over the campaign for that consultation that divided the country.
She was the first female MP assassinated in the country and the first assassinated MP since Ian Gow, a victim of the IRA in 1990.
In 2010, Labor MP Stephen Timms was stabbed by a woman after voting for British intervention in the Iraq war.
And ten years earlier, Liberal Democrat MP’s aide Nigel Jones was killed during a saber attack at a meeting with local voters aimed at the legislator.
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