IAIN DAVIES
On Saturday Novembers 1st, ten people travelling on the 18.45 London North Eastern Railway (LNER) service from Doncaster, South Yorkshire, to London’s King’s Cross station were reportedly stabbed and later hospitalised. One man remains in a critical but stable condition following a knife attack on the train. Five people have been discharged from hospital and five remain. With the exception of the one critical patient, their injuries are not thought to be life threatening .
Two men were arrested at Huntingdon station but one thirty five year old man has been released without charge and excluded from further police inquires. No one knows anything about this second man.
The suspected perpetrator is Anthony Williams, a thirty two year old British man who reportedly caught the train at Peterborough. He is said to have launched the attack in carriage J of the nine carriage train while the train was about ten minutes north of Huntingdon station in Cambridgeshire. Police have said they are not looking for anyone else in connection with the attack and do not consider it to be “terror related.”
Passengers triggered the train emergency stop alarm and an emergency call was received by the police at 19.39 from the LNER train as it approached Huntingdon, where it made an unscheduled emergency stop. British Transport Police (BTP) officers and armed response officers from Cambridgeshire Police were dispatched to Huntingdon station at 19.42. Upon its arrival, passengers able to flee the train ran to safety and, reportedly by 19.50, the police had detained the two men.
Williams allegedly stabbed another person at Pontoon Dock DLR—Docklands Light Railway—station in east London earlier at 00.45 on 1st November. An eye witness report from Huntingdon seemed to indicate that the suspect was quite possibly mentally ill and was raving about fighting “the devil” before begging police to kill him. The police subsequently arrested Anthony Williams and charged him with eleven counts of attempted murder, one count of actual bodily harm, and two counts of possession of bladed article.
When the alarm was raised on the LNER train, counter-terrorism police were alerted. The attack was declared a major incident and Operation Plato was triggered. This is a police and emergency services protocol that is automatically set in motion whenever a “marauding terror attack” is suspected. The Plato protocol requires a predefined police response, including the immediate dispatch of armed counter-terrorism units. Police later stated that Operation Plato was quite quickly rescinded, though it is hard to understand why that would have been the case.
In the immediate aftermath, BTP Superintendent John Loveless told the media “it would not be appropriate to speculate on the cause of this incident.” This sentiment was later reinforced by BTP Chief Superintendent Chris Casey who repeated Supt Loveless’ statement, saying the police would not “speculate” about the cause of the attack.
The Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood also said “I urge people to avoid comment and speculation at this early stage.” The Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said that she is “not going to speculate about [Williams’] motivations,” adding that Williams was “not known to counter-terrorism police, he was not known to the security services, and he was not known to the Prevent programme” [The UK government’s totally illogical and completely baseless re-education program supposedly designed to stop people becoming terrorists].
Former Labour spin-doctor and private sector political lobbyist Tom Harris, writing in his weekly column for the Telegraph, said:
While the causes and motives of Saturday’s distressing events shouldn’t be speculated about, they have nevertheless revealed a fundamental vulnerability of passengers using a system that was never designed to anticipate such appalling violence. [. . .] [I]n a free society where freedom of movement within our borders, free of the need for official approval is (rightly) seen as sacrosanct[,] [n]o level of extra security measures can offer 100 per cent guarantees of individual safety. [. . .] More CCTV cameras – including more widespread use of facial recognition technology [. . .] can make a contribution, either to deterrence of violence or to subsequent investigations. But the degree of state intrusion [. . .] that would be required to remove all risk from our daily lives would be unacceptable to the very public who would most benefit from such measures.
There are a few assumptions we might challenge in Tom Harris’ offered rationale. Why would more facial recognition technology on our railways deter terrorists or the mentally ill? If they are clinically insane or prepared to die for their cause, why would they care if they are spotted on some AI controlled surveillance system?
Would people be automatically stopped from getting on a train if they are on any kind of watch list? And if, as has been suggested in this instance, the suspect was not known to the intelligence agencies or law enforcement, but was potentially known to mental health services, will “facial recognition technology” be used to stop people with a history of mental health problems using public transport?
Most notably, Tom Harris and the Telegraph claim that unacceptably intrusive surveillance “measures” could “remove all risk from our daily lives” and this would provide some sort of public “benefit.” The East German Stasi made a very similar argument. What you end up with, if you allow this level of public surveillance, is a police state which benefits no one other than those who control it.
The police’s refusal to speculate is understandable. They didn’t know what had happened and were keeping an open mind while they gathered evidence. Unlike the police, who are constrained by their duty to objectively investigate and, ultimately, to find and reveal the evidence to show everyone else what happened, the rest of us supposedly still live in a free and open democratic society and are at liberty to comment and speculate. Tom Harris is among the growing number of people who keep acknowledging that we cherish the idea of a free and open society but continuously advocate the deployment of surveillance technology that will end any prospect of us living in one.
I don’t know about you, but neither Mahmood, Alexander, nor Harris—nor anyone else for that matter—rent any space in my mind. You and I can speculate and comment if we wish. Bluntly, why shouldn’t we speculate about what happened?
The definition of “speculate” is to “to guess [or imagine] possible answers to a question when you do not have enough information to be certain.” Sure, we can’t know the answers unless we have the evidence to arrive at meaningful conclusions, but a very close synonym for “speculate” is “hypothesise.” This means “to give a possible but not yet proved explanation for something.”
In other words, speculation is fundamental to deductive reasoning. Mahmood, Alexander, and Harris appear to suggest that we can’t, or should not, think critically about what may have happened unless we are told the officially approved version first. This is either unthinking babble or tyrannical. Who do they think they are to tell us what we can or cannot think?
Providing we don’t incite violence or publicly encourage any other crimes, we can “speculate” and raise any questions we like. Indeed, speculation is a crucial step in forming reasonable questions. And when we look at this reported attack, quite a few reasonable questions immediately spring to mind.
If the suspect stabbed someone in London in the early hours of November 1st, then he must have wound his way to Peterborough, approximately 100 miles north of central London, before getting on a train heading back to London. Why did he do this?
If he was in a psychotically deranged state in London, 19 hours before committing a larger scale attack near Huntingdon, what stopped him from allegedly acting out on his apparent delusions during that period? Schizophrenia episodes, if that is the suggestion, can last anything from days to many months. They do not commonly result in anyone else being harmed by the ill person.
From the suspect’s perspective, if he did attempt mass murder, he couldn’t have picked a worse place to do it. Having seemingly resisted the urge to lash out for most of the day in relatively insecure places, he allegedly decided to attack more people on the precise fifteen minute stretch of the line—Peterborough to Huntingdon—where, just a few months earlier, the police had practiced their response to an identical marauding knife attack. Coincidentally, and unusually, the March exercise scenario envisaged an attack on a train approaching Huntingdon perpetrated not by a terrorist but by a mentally unstable man.
In the March training exercise—on the same line in the same place—when the crisis actors involved raised the alarm, the train stopped. This delayed the response time. When precisely the same scenario reportedly occurred again, eight months later, the decision was reportedly taken to allow the train to continue to Huntingdon.
The whole point of training exercises is to identify and address problems. In this case, the March exercise may have informed the decision to allow the train to proceed to its unscheduled emergency stop in Huntingdon. This was perhaps wise under the circumstances.
Nonetheless, this does present us with a truly staggering string of coincidences. Not only did the attack occur precisely as envisaged in the exact same location as modelled in the training exercise but, it appears, the unusual choice of suspect profile—used in the training exercise—subsequently played out in reality just a few months later. What are the chances?
But the remarkable coincidences don’t stop there.
This decision to take the train to Huntingdon was said to have been “the right thing,” by a man interviewed by the media. Supposedly, he was just a bystander witness to the incident.
The man said:
I think the driver did the right thing. When we um, like, we pulled the emergency, um, contact to let the driver know that something is going on, he pulled into Huntingdon, which is the right thing. He didn’t stop anywhere, because anything could have happened. It was the right thing. [. . .] People who did witness it [the reported attack] have gone off to HQ, with . . . . . . . their statements have been taken. They are now going to the police station to give further statements.
The man the media said was a witness indicated that he didn’t witness the attack but those who did witness it were, according to him, taken to “HQ.” It also sounded as if he was tangentially referencing the March training exercise where the decision to stop the train on the tracks was found not to be the “right thing.” He seemed to have a need to convince people that not stopping when the alarm was raised, and then proceeding to Huntingdon, was “the right thing.” Why was this so important to him?
This so-called witness may not have been a civilian. He seemed eager to emphasise difference, be it the sole difference, between the March exercise and the otherwise identical reported attack in November. Obviously, this is just speculation on my part, but I think it is reasonable.
There are other reasons that might explain why the Huntingdon response was so swift. RAF Wyton lies six miles northeast of Huntingdon. It is home to the Pathfinder building which is the largest defence intelligence centre in the UK. Speaking in parliament in May this year, the Conservative MP for Huntingdon, Ben Obese-Jecty, said:
My constituency of Huntingdon is the home of our defence intelligence capability. It is also home to the joint intelligence operation centre Europe, which is an analytics centre for the US air force, and the NATO Intelligence Fusion Centre. Wyton airfield has recently been designated as a trailblazer site, and it could be a key location at which to build defence technology. Will the Minister meet me to discuss the potential of building a technology hub in Huntingdon
It is certainly fair to say there are a lot of spooks in and around Huntingdon. The security level in the region is high, for obvious reasons. Again, while there is no cause to have any sympathy for the suspect, if he is guilty—and he is innocent until proven so—he supposedly chose to commit a mass assault in one of the most secure places in the country. His reported movements were quite strange. If they were chaotic, due to his mental state, that only makes the coincidence of his alleged crime’s proximity to Huntingdon more remarkable.
Huntingdon sits in the so-called “silicon fen.” It is an industrial center for the development of digital technology. A recent £1.5 billion infrastructure investment program has improved transport links and the government considers the Huntingdon region a centre for growth to achieve its ludicrous net zero economy. Huntingdon is in an important and sensitive part of the country for the government.
Obese-Jecty told Sky News how incredible the police response was in Huntingdon and praised the emergency services. He said to reporters:
The first officers on the scene were actually local response officers. [. . .] They were quickly followed by armed police. That response was rapid. [. . .] The way the agencies worked together last night [the night of the attack] [. . .] was fantastic. Speaking to the Chief Constable he actually said they had been training for an Operation Plato incident only last week. So, um, it’s fresh in the memory and it’s, it’s terrible they would have to bring those skills into effect so quickly
We were told that Plato was declared and then rescinded. The Plato training a few days earlier seemingly contributed to the “rapid” armed response in Huntingdon. The only difference between a Plato “marauding terror attack” and the alleged violence of Anthony Williams, is that Williams’ suggested motivation for his suspected actions apparently differed from those of a terrorist.
It is reasonable to ask why the Plato response was stepped down. The nature of the reported emergency still seemingly required the Plato protocol, no matter what the suspected attacker’s motivations were, none of which were known—supposedly—when armed police responded. How did they judge Plato wasn’t needed?
At the same time, the Huntingdon constituency MP seemed to suggest Plato was used and possibly not rescinded, so why does the official account claim it was dropped? What difference does it make to wider public’s appreciation of what happened whether Plato was active or not?
Does the fact that there was a rehearsal to respond to exactly the same attack, just a few months earlier, present some sort of problem for the official narrative? Does this incredible coincidence becomes even more jarring if we then discover that Operation Plato exercises were underway in the region mere days before a Plato protocol response was used in the same locale. Perhaps putting some distance between all of these mounting coincidences is desired for some reason.
Obese-Jecty is probably familiar with these potential operational concerns having served in the military from 2001 to 2012, leaving with the rank of captain. He operated in Iraq and Afghanistan and subsequently entered the banking industry where he became a project manager for the US banking giant JP Morgan. Ben Obese-Jecty proved his political credentials by campaigning against all hope in safe Labour constituencies from 2019. He was rewarded by being parachuted into the safe Conservative constituency of Huntingdon in 2023, taking his comfortable seat in 2024. Obese-Jecty is on the up-and-up.
One of Obese-Jecty’s campaigning causes is stopping knife crime, especially youth knife crime, and he has written for Conservative Home on the subject. In March 2025, just as the Huntingdon train knife attack response was being practiced by the emergency services, Obese-Jecty, MP for Huntingdon, led a parliamentary debate about reducing knife crime. This doesn’t mean much, we are just speculating, but yet another coincidence is an interesting observation nonetheless.
Certainly Obese-Jecty’s Conservative parliamentary colleagues have been quick to use the incident to argue for more surveillance and social controls to tackle knife crime. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, the former chairman of the Conservative Bow Group policy think tank, also used the attack to call for more surveillance technology.
In his piece for the Telegraph, he wrote:
We have now all heard eyewitness accounts of this horrific act of violence and watched the footage of armed police running down the platform at Huntingdon station.
This is true. So far we have heard hearsay evidence about an attack and have seen video footage of an armed police operation. We have not seen any observable physical evidence to corroborate the narrative we have been given.
That firmer evidence is precisely what the police are investigating in order to hopefully present it at a trial. In the meantime, all we have is a story reported in the media. While we hope the reported victims all recover from their injuries, as yet we haven’t seen any physical evidence to demonstrate how they sustained them or who inflicted them.
Stories, even from reported eye witnesses, need to be verified by assessing the degree to which they are supported by the physical, forensically testable evidence.
Philp added:
In the coming days, we will hear more about exactly what happened on this grim Saturday evening and about inspiring individual acts of heroism from those on the train.
This seems highly likely. But, for many of us, these stories are no substitute for the evidence we would like to see to verify them. While such tales will doubtless be liberally plastered across the mainstream media, absent confirmatory evidence, some members of the public may well reserve the right to take them all with a pinch of salt.
Philp argued that tackling knife crime should be prioritised by allowing the police to increase stop and search. He concluded:
Rolling out live facial recognition in town centres – and train stations – will help to ensure that those who are wanted for breaking the law cannot evade justice and go on to commit further crimes. And it will help police identify and search known dangerous offenders to ensure they are not preparing to offend again.
There is a clear, discernible cross-party pattern in the publicised response to the attack. While the police have logically declined to speculate about the suspect’s motivations—until they understand them and have evidence to support their assessment—the same cannot be said for those who appear to know what the response to the reported attack should be. They seem to have quite a lot of knowledge about what happened and have consistently offered technological social control measure as the solution.
Presumably, therefore, these people are already cognisant of the suspect’s motivations and have a firm grasp of events, despite the fact that, as yet, none of us have seen any observable physical evidence showing us what happened. If they don’t have this knowledge of the evidence, then, while you and I are told we should not speculate, some of those who tell us not to speculate have offered increased surveillance as a remedy based on nothing but their own speculation. This includes politicians and the mainstream media journalists who have collectively speculated wildly with abandon.
As we have already highlighted, some of the witness accounts raise questions which, presumably, the police investigation will answer. Another reported witness was Dayna Arnold. She initially gave an interview to Cambridge Live which is a Reach-owned publication. Reach is one of the largest UK newsgroups and centralises control over numerous local news publications and national media outlets, including the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Sunday Express, Daily Star, WalesOnline, OK! magazine, and the Scottish Daily Record and Sunday Mail.
It is therefore not surprising that Dayna Arnold’s witness account, reported to Cambridge Live, was syndicated nationally—word-for-word in many instances. The UK state broadcaster the BBC, for example, not only reported Arnold’s account, it collated and subsequently reported many of the other media reports of her account. As if the media reports themselves were somehow convincing of something.
It was Dayna’s witness story that gave rise to the notion that the suspect was mentally unstable. This was also something Philp mentioned and it comports with the training scenario used in the March exercise. This seemingly legitimises the idea that we don’t just need mass surveillance to protect ourselves against marauding terror attacks but also against the claimed deranged violence of the severely mentally ill.
People with mental illness—which could affect any of us at any time—have lived in our families and communities throughout human history. To date, no one—with the exception of vile regimes such as the Nazis—has ever suggested that the mentally ill present some sort of societal level threat. Of course, people who are experiencing psychotic episodes are potentially a risk but overwhelmingly they are a risk to themselves, rather than anyone else. Yet the Huntingdon attack narrative is clearly suggesting we need, for the first time in our history, to accept mass surveillance to “stay safe” from vulnerable people suffering debilitating illness.
Dayna Arnold’s account is clearly central to the story we have been given about the suspected attacker. Arnold is also the senior Project Manager and a business leader for Zest Consult LTD, a digital transformation consultancy that advises clients in both the public and the private sector. Zest describes itself as:
[A] tightknit team of digital technology specialists who are passionate about CCTV systems and other operational technology, digital technology consultancy, artificial intelligence, and situation awareness. Together we apply our knowledge and expertise to a wide variety of scenarios and challenges faced by clients across multiple industries, particularly the military, security and transport sectors.
Presumably, if they investigate her statement, the police will consider Dayna Arnold’s evident conflict of financial interest as potential motivation for her making any official witness statement. This is not, in any way, to suggest that her account is false, but, as the financial conflict of interest is obvious, the police must surely appraise that fact before treating her witness statement as reliable evidence. Though it should be noted that all Huntingdon witnesses have been offered money by the government, so Dayna Arnold’s apparent financial conflict isn’t unique to her.
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Consequently, at this point, while we have been led to believe that the suspect’s actions were motivated by his confused mental state, as Dayna Arnold’s witness statement appears to be the source for this claim, it cannot be assumed. While the suspect’s motivation is unclear, the motivation of those who are using the attack as an alleged justification to increase surveillance of the public is not.
The Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said that the Labour Government did not think “airport style scanners would be the way to go,” but added that “we do need to take sensible and proportionate steps to make the public transport network safe.” Evidently, this means extending the use of the AI facial recognition systems that are already operating in train stations around the UK.
Those facial recognition systems need to be trained to recognise our faces. Though some of these systems are supposedly predictive—allegedly capable of predicting what we are about to do—to identify us, and thereby screen us from accessing public spaces like train stations, our faces need to have already been submitted to the surveillance AI. The easiest way to achieve this is to get us all to adopt digital ID.
By accepting digital ID we will submit our biometric details, including machine readable images of our faces, to the AI systems run by the government’s private sector partners, such as Palantir’s Gotham. “Interoperable” AI systems like Gotham can ensure our faces are distributed system wide. We can then be recognised by AI at any train station, at any time, and our movements tracked in real time.
Coincidentally, not only has the Huntingdon attack been used to strengthen calls for increased AI facial recognition surveillance across the UK transport network, it comes just weeks after the UK government kicked-off the digital ID debate in the UK with its misleading BritCard launch.
Furthermore, the UK government has a long track record of being involved in false flag terror attacks and of supporting terrorist groups. If we are looking for means, opportunity, and motive for the attack, it is not unreasonable to speculate that the state, or elements aligned to the state, may have been behind it.
For nearly four decades, MI6 worked closely with the CIA to commit hundreds of false flag terrorist atrocities across Europe in what became known as Operation Gladio. The series of Gladio attacks and resultant conflicts, that killed thousands of innocent European civilians, were largely perpetrated by neo-Nazi terrorist and paramilitary groups and the media was then used to blame the violence on far-left groups for political and propaganda purposes. Similarly, the 2003 Stevens inquiry report revealed how British counter-terrorism units and intelligence agencies “partcipate[d] in terrorist crimes.”
Gladio terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra described the theory underpinning the intelligence agencies’ decades-long false flag terror campaign. It was known to Gladio terror-operatives as the “Strategy of Tension.” The objective was to terrify the public in order to convince them to accept control measures imposed by the government for their safety.
Quite clearly, the Huntingdon attack could have been a state-run operation that exploits the Strategy of Tension with the aim of convincing us all to accept digital ID and facial recognition surveillance. Perhaps the suspect was co-opted for this purpose. It could also have been the horrific and highly unusual act of a severely mentally ill individual. Though planning and executing a stratagem is not something people in a delusional state are generally capable of doing.
The only way to know is to thoroughly examine all of the evidence and we can only trust that is what the police investigation will do. But, if the police’ avenue of inquiry automatically excludes, or refuses to explore, the possibility of state orchestrated operation, especially seeing as the circumstantial evidence seems to raise that potential, there will be little reason to “trust” their findings and the unanswered question will only stoke further speculation.
Let’s hope the police investigation is indeed thorough and objective.
This article (The Huntingdon Train Attack: Speculation and Further Questions) was created and published by Iain Davis and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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