UK police are probing an assault involving pepper spray at a Heathrow Airport car park that disrupted travel and left 21 people, including a three-year-old girl, needing medical treatment.<\/p>\n
In a departure from an earlier account of the incident at Terminal 3’s multi-storey car park, London’s Metropolitan Police said it now appeared to have stemmed from a suitcase robbery by people known to each other.<\/p>\n
Commander Peter Stevens, who had previously characterised it as an argument that escalated into a fight, said investigators had pieced together the chaotic chain of events after reviewing CCTV and interviewing witnesses.<\/p>\n
“At this stage, it’s understood that a woman was robbed of her suitcase by a group of four men, who sprayed a substance believed to be pepper spray in her direction,” he added.<\/p>\n
“This occurred within a car park lift, with those in the lift and surrounding area affected by the spray.<\/p>\n
“Our officers are working to determine the full circumstances around what happened but we do believe this to be an isolated incident with those directly involved known to each other.”<\/p>\n
Armed officers arrested a 31-year-old man on suspicion of assault after responding to the scene shortly after 8am.<\/p>\n
“He remains in custody and enquiries remain ongoing to locate further suspects,” police said in an update.<\/p>\n
Emergency responders treated 21 patients, with five taken to hospital, the London Ambulance Service said.<\/p>\n
The three-year-old received treatment at the scene, with all the injuries “not believed to be life-changing or life-threatening”, according to police.<\/p>\n
Firefighters provided “specialist assistance” at the scene, London’s Fire Brigade said.<\/p>\n
Terminal 3 at Europe’s busiest airport remained open throughout, but the incident prompted severe traffic and public transport disruption in the area, according to officials and reports.<\/p>\n
Passengers complained about having missed flights due to its impact.<\/p>\n
“We were literally stuck for an hour-and-a-half,” Jayesh Patel, whose family were headed to the airport for a flight to India said.<\/p>\n
“We ran to the gate, and we missed the check-in by three minutes, and we were turned away.<\/p>\n
“So we’re gonna have to drive 100 miles back home.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"UK police are probing an assault involving pepper spray at a Heathrow Airport car park that disrupted travel…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":180256,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-180255","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180255\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}