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Woman in a veil knifed British MP in the gut
Shocked witnesses told last night how MP Stephen Timms was stabbed in the gut by a young woman wearing an orange headscarf and veil. The 21-year-old Asian lunged at popular Mr Timms - a leading anti-knife crime campaigner - as he held a constituency surgery at about 3.15pm. The Labour MP screamed as she calmly pushed a kitchen knife twice into his abdomen before she was wrestled away and disarmed by brave aide Andrew Bazeley. Last night cops revealed Mr Timms, 54, was lucky to be alive as the blade missed his vital organs. The ex-finance minister was said to be "in good spirits" in hospital, and was to be kept in overnight for observation. Cops, who recovered a knife from the scene, held the woman at a police station as doctors assessed her mental condition. Married Mr Timms, who held East Ham, East London, in the election with the largest majority in Britain, was attacked at a local council centre in Beckton. A staff member said: "There were two women there with babies. One was with the MP. "Then they went and another woman who was standing there just sort of lunged at him. Everyone was screaming - it happened so quickly. He was bleeding. You could see it through his shirt. "He stood up and went into the toilet. Then staff took him into a back office to lay him down until paramedics came. One paramedic was talking to him but he did not reply." Schoolgirl Sagal Ahmed, who was in the centre's library at the time, said: "I heard screaming and went into the surgery room. There was a skinny woman wearing an orange headscarf and a veil. I was told someone grabbed her after she stabbed Mr Timms. She was led away by police in handcuffs. She didn't say anything." A police source said: "He could easily have been killed. The knife missed his vital organs. But an inch or two either way and it would have been curtains." The source added the woman was "quite lucid", did not seem disturbed and had no apparent history of mental problems. Cops are trying to discover why she wanted to see Mr Timms, known as a committed Christian, and whether she had a specific complaint. But local community worker Rahman Fazlur described Mr Timms as "an excellent MP" and said he had first-rate relations with the Asian community. The stabbing comes a decade after Lib Dem Nigel Jones was wounded and his aide Andrew Pennington killed in a sword attack during a constituency surgery in Cheltenham, Gloucs. Posted by: ryuge 2010-05-15 |
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