Man found guilty over car attack outside UK parliament

A London jury on Wednesday, July 17, convicted a man of attempted murder after he tried to mow down cyclists, pedestrians and police with his car outside the British parliament last year, in an attack prosecutors said had a terrorist motive.

Jurors at the Old Bailey, England's central criminal court, agreed with the prosecution that Salih Khater, 30, had made "a deliberate attempt to kill and maim as many people as possible" when he steered the vehicle at his targets outside the Houses of Parliament last August.

Although the Sudanese-born British national did not kill anyone, and ended up crashing the car into security barriers, the August 14 attack sent several people to hospital for treatment. 

The counter-terrorism division at England's Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said it was reasonable to assume he had a terrorist motive.

It noted that he chose "an iconic site of national importance which had been subjected to terrorist attacks in the recent past".

Jenny Hopkins, from the CPS, said: "Whatever his motives, this was not an accident. It was a deliberate attempt to kill and maim as many people as possible."