Faith leaders, the head of the Metropolitan Police and hundreds of people joined a vigil on Monday night, after the Finsbury Park terror attack in north London.
The attack took place shortly after midnight on Sunday, close to the Muslim Welfare House. One man died and 11 people were injured after a van ploughed into a group of worshippers near the Finsbury Park Mosque after they had left Ramadan night prayers. The group had gathered to help an elderly man who had collapsed.
The driver of the van, Darren Osborne, 47, from Cardiff was detained by local people in the minutes after the attack. He is alleged to have shouted, “I want to kill all Muslims – I did my bit.” The mosque’s imam, Mohammed Mahmoud, urged the crowd to be restrained and calm before a passing police van was flagged down.
Pledging his support to the leaders of the mosque, the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, expressed his “profound shock” over the attack. “Violence breeds violence. Hatred breeds hatred. Every one of us must repudiate hatred and violence from our words and actions,” the cardinal said. “We must all be builders of understanding, compassion and peace, day by day, in our homes, our work and our communities. That is the only way.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said the attack “is an attack on us all and on the culture and values of our country”. This “wanton and cruel act can produce no good and cannot be justified or excused”, he added.
As the police investigation continued, Muslim leaders called for security to be stepped up at mosques around the country in the final week of the holy month of Ramadan.
The attack is the “most violent manifestation to date” of rising Islamophobia, according to the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an umbrella group for more than 500 mosques and institutions.
“Muslim communities have been calling for increased action to tackle the growth in hate crime for many years and transformative action must now be taken to tackle not only this incident but the hugely worrying growth in Islamophobia,” the MCB said.
Writing in The Guardian, the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, said that the Government is working to tackle hate crime and “all forms of extremism”. “We must unite the might of community spirit and the full force of the law to ensure every person in the UK is protected,” she added.
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