3 Dead and 3 Wounded in Nottingham Attacks

A man was arrested early Tuesday on the suspicion of murder after three people, including two students, were found dead in the city of Nottingham, in central England. The arrest followed an apparent series of attacks that the police described as linked and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain called a “shocking incident.”

Details were few, but the police said they were first alerted just after 4 a.m. about two of the deaths. They were then called to a nearby street in the city center, where three other people were found wounded after a driver attempted to run them over with a van, according to a statement by the Nottinghamshire Police. Soon after, another man was found dead in a third street.

A 31-year-old man was arrested in connection with the deaths. The three other injured people, including one man who was in critical condition, were receiving treatment in a hospital, the police said.

“This is a tragic series of events which has led to the lives of three innocent people being taken,” Chief Constable Kate Meynell of the Nottinghamshire Police said in the statement. She said that the authorities were “keeping an open mind” as they gathered evidence to determine a motive behind the attack.

“Currently, we do not believe there is anyone else involved in this incident,” the chief constable said.

Two of those who died were students at the University of Nottingham, according to a statement from the school. “We are shocked and devastated by the news and our thoughts are with those affected, their families and friends,” the statement said.

From the early morning and into Tuesday afternoon, several main roads had been closed and Nottingham’s tram service had been partly suspended.

The authorities had not given any indication that the alarming succession of violence was connected to terrorism, with the police saying only that they were working with a team of detectives and counterterrorism police to “establish the facts” in an ongoing investigation that was still in its “early stages.”

“The police must be given the time to undertake their work,” Mr. Sunak wrote in a Twitter post, expressing his condolences for the families of the victims.

One witness told the BBC that she saw the van assault.

“I’m shaky — I’ve never seen anything like it,” said the witness, Lynn Haggitt, in an interview with the broadcaster. She said that she saw a driver in a van check his rearview mirror before he accelerated into two people. “The woman went on the curb and the man went up in the air,” she said.

Ben Bradley, who leads the Nottinghamshire County Council and represents a nearby town in Parliament, wrote in a statement posted to Twitter: “To see this level of violence on our city’s streets is unimaginable and emotional for everyone who lives and works here.”

“I’m grateful to the police and other authorities who have stepped in and made an arrest,” he added.

Nottingham, a two-hour train ride north of London, is a city of more than 300,000 people at the center of an urban area of over 750,000. It was the birthplace of Raleigh bicycles and John Player cigarettes, as well as the hometown of the fashion designer Paul Smith and the writer Alan Sillitoe, whose first novel became the film “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.”

The cycle factory depicted in that film closed decades ago, and others have also departed. A spate of gang-related crime in the city repeatedly made national headlines in the 2000s. But it remains an economic hub, with two large universities and major employers including the pharmacy chain Boots.

Peter Robins contributed reporting.