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An explosion outside a Liverpool hospital was a terrorist incident, according to UK police.
One man died in the foiled terrorist plot outside of Liverpool Women’s Hospital.
The blast occurred inside of a taxi that was parked outside of the hospital.
The head of Counterterrorism Policing in England said the explosion was caused by “the ignition of an explosive device.”
Jackson said “enquiries will now continue to seek to understand how the device was built, the motivation for the incident and to understand if anyone else was involved in it.”
The device was brought into the vehicle by a passenger and the taxi driver was injured while trying to escape.
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Three men in their 20s were arrested elsewhere in the city under the Terrorism Act on Sunday, and a fourth was detained on Monday, he said..
Suspicions about a motive for the explosion have been aroused by the timing — just before 11 a.m. on Remembrance Sunday, the moment people across Britain hold services in memory of those killed in wars.
Jackson said investigators had not found a link to remembrance events, “but it is a line of inquiry we are pursuing.”
“Although the motivation for this incident is yet to be understood, given all the circumstances, it has been declared a terrorist incident,” he said at a press briefing.
He said the passenger had been picked up by the cab a 10-minute drive away and asked to be taken to the hospital, where the explosion occurred. The driver, named locally as David Perry, managed to escape from the car. He was treated in hospital and released.
