The local community feared a repeat of last year's Suites Hotel riot.
A train station stabbing left Liverpool’s Muslim community on edge today, even before far-right protesters gathered outside a city mosque.
Megan Rimmer, 36, was getting the train back from Liverpool with her daughters when she saw the attack in Blundellsands & Crosby train station just after 2pm.
As she wheeled her buggy off the platform, a man turned around and stabbed a man, believed to be Muslim, who had been walking out of the station behind him.
‘They were both going through the same gate and the white guy just turned around and lunged at him with a knife’, she told Metro.
‘He put his hand out and the knife went into his hand.’
She added: ‘He was just stood there with blood pouring out of his hand. It looked really bad. There was blood everywhere.’
After barricading herself and her daughters in the station waiting room until she was certain the attacker had run away, Megan emerged to help the man.
He was still in shock as she removed her keffiyeh, wrapped it around his hand and told him to apply pressure to the wound.
Blood was left on the station floor more than an hour later when emergency services had left and Megan returned.
The whole ordeal horrified Megan, who said: ‘I’m just sad and scared. It was really, really upsetting.’
But the attack has been particularly alarming for Liverpool’s Muslim community, who were already bracing themselves to be targets of a far-right protest tonight.
Organisers had been describing it as a ‘major clash’ in graphics shared on social media ahead of the protest outside the Abdullah Quilliam Mosque.
‘It is quite worrying’, Lila Tamea, a local hijabi woman who joined the counterprotest, told Metro.
‘Especially with the stabbing in Crosby today. Hearing that took place just hours before this, I was quite worried.’
For a long time, Liverpool had a reputation for never letting the far-right march through the city.
Anti-fascist demonstrators had famously stopped them from even leaving train stations.
Various attempts saw them pelted with banana skins and trapped in luggage rooms or even a pub, often to the Benny Hill theme tune.
But the city’s anti-racist activists got a shock last year when a riot erupted outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Kirkby, just outside Liverpool.
Far from their usually sense of victory, they found themselves trapped and outnumbered as rioters burned vehicles, threw projectiles and shouted abuse.
After seeing riots spread from Southport to Hartlepool, London, Manchester and Aldershot this week, the local community feared a repeat on last year.
The unrest was sparked after the fatal stabbing in nearby Southport on Monday, but it’s taken a distinctly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim tone.
Mosques, refugees and people who ‘look Asian’ have been attacked, and even Sunderland tonight saw cars and a police station set on fire.
But that’s not how it went down in Liverpool.
Roughly 50 far-right protesters were outnumbers by the nearly 300 anti-racists who arrived to defend the Abdullah Quilliam Mosque.
The first ever opened in the UK, back in 1889, its Victorian founders found themselves pelted with stones and manure as they left.
But it also has a history of opening its doors to anyone, even those who disagree, according to Adam Kelwick, who said they would be handing out food and drink to anyone who attended.
No far-right protesters took them up on that offer of refreshments or conversation, but the anti-racist counterprotesters did.
Lila said: ‘The past couple of nights, it’s been difficult not knowing what to expect. Obviously I’m a visible hijabi Muslim woman in Liverpool, I commute, I get the train.
‘I know Scousers, and I know Liverpool is quite an anti-racist city, it’s quite a leftist city as well, so I think the scenes tonight are to be expected.
‘It’s been nice to see, and I did expect quite a good turn-out, but I did expect a lot more of the far-right to come, so I do think the counter-demo really did its job in deterring them.
‘I definitely think the far-right would have been more emboldened [if there was no counter-demo]. They were still shouting despite the numbers we’ve seen here today, we’ve got 200 and there were about 50 far-right.
‘Even then, they were quite emboldened to shout despite the police and the amount of counter-protesters, but they just look very silly.’
British Transport Police and North West Ambulance Service have been approached for comment on the stabbing in Crosby.
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