MAN BEHEADED IN LONDON TERROR ATTACK

LONDON, U.K - British counter-terrorism police were Thursday investigating the murder of a man thought to be a soldier, who was butchered and beheaded on a busy London street by two men shouting Islamist slogans.

The attackers, wielding knives including a meat cleaver, carried out the attack a few hundred metres (yards) from the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, southeast London, then delivered an Islamist tirade to passers-by.

Prime Minister David Cameron condemned the "appalling crime", adding: "There are strong indications that it is a terrorist incident."

He cut short a visit to Paris to fly back for a meeting of the government's emergency response committee, COBRA, which had already met in the hours following the attack.

• Media reports citing witnesses said the men first ran over their victim in a car before finishing him off with the knives.
• Eyewitnesses described how after the two men carried out their attack, they stayed at the scene, asking passers-by to photograph and film them.
• Armed police shot and wounded the two attackers after they ran at officers, said witnesses. Both were being treated in hospital, said police.
• Amateur footage of one of the men carrying a blood-stained knife and meat cleaver shows him saying: "We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you."
• The man, a black man dressed in a hooded jacket and black woolly hat, speaks in a London accent.
• "We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," he says.

Source: Reuters