A MILLION PEOPLE
With most people off work for the Spring Bank Holiday, officials estimated that around 1 million people descended on the 16 km parade route to watch the Liverpool team travel through the city on an open-top bus with the Premier League trophy.
Liverpool last won the league during the COVID-19 pandemic when celebrations were not permitted due to lockdowns.
Police said the car hit the spectators as the event was winding down. In the aftermath, a Reuters photographer saw emergency services carrying victims on stretchers and in their arms to nearby ambulances.
The driver was reported to have followed an ambulance into a street that had been closed to traffic.
One source told MailOnline that it looked like he panicked when he realised he was in the crowd and people started banging on his car.
The driver, who was sounding his horn, reversed and then accelerated forwards, according to reports from other witnesses.
Police were unusually quick to provide a description of the man they arrested, saying around two hours after the incident that they had arrested a “53-year-old white British man from the Liverpool area”.
Former police officers and local politicians said that statement was needed to cool social media speculation that the episode was an Islamist attack.
“That was one of my first concerns, that we needed to get the story out quickly,” mayor Rotheram told the BBC.
“If there’s a vacuum, we know there are some elements that will try to inflame the situation and to create that speculation and to put misinformation out there.”
The same police force oversaw the response to the murder of three young girls in the nearby town of Southport last year, an incident which sparked days of rioting, fuelled initially by speculation online over the identity of the attacker.
