Police arrested a man at London\u2019s Heathrow Airport after a crowd of people were hit with pepper spray during a robbery at a parking garage that caused several hours of travel disruptions.<\/p>\n
Five people were taken by ambulance to a hospital and another 16, including a 3-year-old girl, were treated at the scene, officials said. None of the injuries was believed to be serious.<\/p>\n
The incident in the Terminal 3 garage on the outskirts of London happened when a group of four men stole a woman\u2019s suitcase in an elevator and sprayed her with an irritant, Metropolitan Police said.<\/p>\n
Passenger Tom Bate said he saw three young men in black with their heads covered run from the elevator and then he experienced a burning sensation in his throat and immediately began hacking.<\/p>\n
“Everyone in the room was coughing,” he told Sky News. “It was one of the weirdest things I\u2019ve ever experienced.”<\/p>\n
Police said the robbery victim and the assailants knew each other and the crime was not being investigated as terrorism.<\/p>\n
Bate said he initially feared the worst as a large group of officers carrying guns \u2014 a rarity in the UK where most police don\u2019t carry weapons \u2014 ran past him shouting.<\/p>\n
“It was absolutely terrifying and I 100% believed that I was in a terrorist attack for a few moments,” he said.<\/p>\n
He said an officer pointed a gun at a man and ordered him to the ground to arrest him.<\/p>\n
A 31-year-old man was held on suspicion of assault. Police were searching for the other suspects who left the scene.<\/p>\n
The incident caused several hours of delays for passengers trying to get to and from the airport.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Police arrested a man at London\u2019s Heathrow Airport after a crowd of people were hit with pepper spray…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":172552,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39,1745],"class_list":["post-172551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-uk-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}