Special episode: could the mass train stabbing have been prevented?
·38 min·2 clips
"It's a terrifying act, doesn't make it an act of terrorism. You're looking for the cause, ideological."
1. The Crime Agents' special episode asks whether the LNER train stabbing on the night after Halloween could have been prevented, and why it was not classed as terrorism.
2. Crime journalist Andy Hughes hosts with Neil Basu, a former head of UK counter-terrorism policing, who says he has dealt with many attacks that were terrorism.
3. The central argument is that a "terrifying act" is not automatically "an act of terrorism", because police must find an ideological cause before the label applies.
4. Hughes recounts the timeline: the train left Peterborough around 7.40pm, a former Royal Navy operative driving it diverted to Huntingdon, and the suspect was tasered and arrested 8 minutes after the first call, with 10 people injured and 9 treated for life-threatening injuries.
5. Anthony Williams, 32, is charged with 10 counts of attempted murder, knife possession and actual bodily harm, plus an earlier attempted murder charge from an incident 18 hours before; passenger Stephen Crean describes the attacker asking "do you want to die?" during a struggle.
6. Basu says the first question in such cases is whether the person was known to authorities, and that profiling the suspect's history may reveal missed points of intervention such as mental health or police contact.
7. He credits the 8-minute response to armed officers trained since 2015, the driver's refusal to stop in open country, and Taser as a less lethal option in a crowded carriage with a risky "backdrop".
8. Basu defends police naming a suspect's ethnicity quickly to cut speculation, noting one viral post claimed the suspect shouted "Al-Akbar", but says police must be consistent across all suspects.
9. He rejects airport-style security, wider armed patrols and pepper spray on trains, saying British Transport Police would need to "triple or quadruple" in size, and argues instead for effective stop and search, longer knife sentences, violence reduction units and mental health funding.
10. Suited to listeners who want a former counter-terrorism chief's explanation of how terrorism is defined and decided.
