News

Brendan Cox on how the Westminster terrorist attack should really be remembered

Picture:
Picture:
Jonathan Brady - WPA Pool / Getty Images

Police have named the man responsible for the terror attack in Westminster, as 52-year-old Khalid Masood.

On Wednesday afternoon, shortly after Prime Minister's Questions, a police officer was stabbed and killed outside the British Houses of Parliament.

A car had also ploughed into a crowd of people on Westminster bridge, killing one woman and injuring many, and three French teenagers on a school trip to London were also badly injured in the attack.

The Kent-born man had his first conviction in November 1983 for criminal damage and his last conviction was for possession of a knife in 2003.

He was known to the police by a number of aliases, and had not been convicted of any terrorism offences.

At present, five people - including the attacker - are confirmed dead and up to 40 people have been injured.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4 this morning, Brendan Cox - the husband of the late MP Jo Cox who was sadly killed last year - urged listeners to be very careful how they react to this attack.

The first thing to remember, he said, is to be aware of the impact that the people who died, will have on their families.

The thousands of lives that will be touched by that and the individual tragedies.

He went on to reflect on when he lost his wife Jo, and how he coped with the insurmountable loss.

I think what helped me in the weeks after...was that sense of public support - those thousands of acts of kindness.

And then he made an important point:

What the terrorist would like to happen is for us to fall apart and start blaming groups of people, to say that in some way this is Muslim or Islam as a whole.

The person - who in this case is Masood - is not representative of the British Muslim population.

We have to remember that the person who did this is no more representative of British Muslims than the person who killed Jo is representative of people that are from Yorkshire.

In fact, he wants people to remember the name of the victims - like PC Palmer, not the person who afflicted the pain.

He added that thing he 'hated' the most in the weeks after Jo's death was the name and picture of her attacker being plastered everywhere. "That was of no interest to me," he commented to Radio 4.

He later tweeted:

I don't care about the name of the attacker. This is the name I will remember.

More: Westminster terrorist incident: What we know and what we don't know

The Conversation (0)
x