A police boat crashed into Westminster Bridge in central London on Friday (local time), tossing officers into the River Thames and injuring five of the crew, the Metropolitan Police said.<\/p>\n
Paramedics treated the injured on a black inflatable boat as a police helicopter hovered overhead near the clock tower that houses the bell known as Big Ben.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t immediately clear what the boat was doing at the time or how it crashed, though the Met said it would be thoroughly reviewed.<\/p>\n
Mateo Bilis-Lusevic, a 12-year-old visiting from Chile, said he was on a tour boat with his mother when they saw the crash.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwo boats were riding extremely fast through the water,” he said. \u201cSuddenly, I heard a boom. I was looking towards the boat, and I heard a boom. Then three people went flying into the water, and one of the people was really hurt.\u201d<\/p>\n
He estimated the officers were in the water for about 10 minutes and one was thrown a life ring.<\/p>\n
There was no immediate information on the extent of injuries. Police did not believe any civilians were involved or hurt.<\/p>\n
A large crowd gathered to watch as ambulances and fire crews responded but were eventually cleared from the bridge, which was closed to traffic.<\/p>\n
A Port of London Authority spokesperson said it was helping manage river traffic and was working with the Metropolitan Police and the Coastguard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A police boat crashed into Westminster Bridge in central London on Friday (local time), tossing officers into the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":542713,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39,1745],"class_list":["post-542712","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\/542712","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=542712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542712\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/542713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=542712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=542712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=542712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}