Parliament member slain on U.K. street

LONDON -- A British lawmaker who campaigned for the country to stay in the European Union was killed Thursday by a gun- and knife-wielding attacker in her small-town constituency.

Jo Cox, a 41-year-old Labor Party legislator who praised the contribution of immigrants to the United Kingdom and championed the cause of war-scarred Syrian refugees, was attacked outside a library in Birstall, northern England, after a regular meeting with constituents. Police would not speculate on the attacker's motive.

Witnesses described a man shooting Cox several times and appearing also to stab her as she lay on the pavement. A 77-year-old man was also injured in the attack.

Police said they had arrested a 52-year-old man and were not looking for anyone else.

"Our working presumption ... is that this is a lone incident," said Dee Collins, acting chief constable of West Yorkshire police.

In Birstall, a city of about 17,000, police cordoned off the area around Market Street, where the attack took place.

Collins said at a news conference that several weapons, including a gun, had been recovered from the scene and were being analyzed. "This is a very significant investigation, with large numbers of witnesses that have been spoken to by the police at this time," she said, adding, "We are not in a position to discuss any motive at this time."

Residents identified the suspect to the BBC and other media as a Birstall resident. Neighbors said the man was quiet and did gardening work for area people.

Gun ownership in Britain has been tightly controlled since a 1996 massacre at a school in Scotland.

Cox is the first serving member of Parliament to be killed in a quarter of a century, and British politicians of all persuasions expressed deep shock.

Both the "Leave" and "Stay" campaigns suspended activity ahead of next week's vote over whether the U.K. should remain a part of the 28-member EU. Prime Minister David Cameron canceled a speech and rally in Gibraltar, and flags on British government buildings were lowered to half-staff.

"This is absolutely tragic and dreadful news," Cameron said. "We have lost a great star. She was a great campaigning MP with huge compassion and a big heart."

Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn said on Twitter that "the whole of the Labour Party and Labour family -- and indeed the whole country -- will be in shock at the horrific murder of Jo Cox today."

"Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve," he said.

It wasn't clear whether Cox had been targeted, or how the injured man was wounded.

The U.K.'s Press Association news agency quoted eyewitness Hithem Ben Abdallah, 56, as saying Cox got involved in a scuffle between two men in Birstall, a small market town some 200 miles north of London.

"There was a guy who was being very brave and another guy with a white baseball cap who he was trying to control, and the man in the baseball cap suddenly pulled a gun from his bag," Ben Abdallah said.

Ben Abdallah said the gun went off twice and "she fell between two cars and I came and saw her bleeding" on the ground.

Cox was shot while trying to intervene, he said. His account could not be independently verified.

Clarke Rothwell, who runs a nearby cafe, told the BBC he believed that Cox had been shot and stabbed multiple times.

"Three times she was shot, the initial time which then she dropped to the floor and two more times," he said. "The third time he got close proximity, he shot her around the head area.

"In the meantime he was stabbing her as well. He was stabbing her with his knife," Rothwell said. "He was shouting, 'Put Britain first!' He shouted it about two or three times."

Shopkeeper Sanjeev Kumar told the BBC he saw a woman lying on the ground "bleeding from the mouth and nose," with two women trying to help her.

Kumar said the attack was the sort of violence that "never, never happened here."

Outspoken on Syria

Cox spent many years working for aid groups including Oxfam and Save the Children, visiting problem-plagued areas including Darfur and Afghanistan. She was elected to the House of Commons in the May 2015 general election and headed Parliament's Friends of Syria group.

She was one of the most outspoken lawmakers on the subject of the Syrian civil war, and she was critical of Britain's reluctance to deepen its military involvement against the Islamic State extremist group as part of efforts to end it. But she abstained last year when Parliament voted to launch airstrikes on Islamic State targets in Syria, saying a more wide-ranging solution to the conflict was needed.

In her first speech to Parliament last year, Cox spoke of how the area she represented had "been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan."

"While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us," she said.

Immigration has been a flash point in the referendum campaign, with many Leave supporters eager to curb the number of migrants to Britain by leaving the EU, which operates on the principle of free movement of people between member states.

Cox was an enthusiastic supporter of the Stay cause in the referendum. Last week, she wrote on Twitter: "Immigration is a legitimate concern, but it's not a good reason to leave the EU."

On Wednesday, she campaigned on the River Thames in London with her husband and two young children. Her husband, Brendan Cox, posted images on Twitter of the family in an inflatable dinghy, waving a flag supporting continued British EU membership.

"Today is the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. More difficult, more painful, less joyful, less full of love," Brendan Cox, said in a statement after the slaying.

"She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her," he said. "Hate doesn't have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the killing was "an assault on everyone who cares about and has faith in democracy."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the slaying tragic, while French President Francois Hollande sent "condolences and compassion" to Cox's family and loved ones and expressed his "full solidarity" with the British people. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen called the killing "a true shock."

Gabrielle Giffords, a former member of Congress who survived an assassination attempt in 2011 by a gunman who killed six other people, wrote on Twitter that she was "absolutely sickened to hear of the assassination of Jo Cox." Giffords added: "She was young, courageous, and hardworking. A rising star, mother, and wife."

No serving U.K. member of Parliament has been killed since 1990, when the Irish Republican Army killed Conservative lawmaker Ian Gow with a booby-trap bomb placed under his car outside his English home. A former lawmaker, Donald Kaberry, was injured in an IRA bombing in 1990 and died the next year.

Information for this article was contributed by Jill Lawless, Gregory Katz, Paisley Dodds and Shawn Pogatchnik of The Associated Press and by Stephen Castle, Pauline Bock, Steven Erlanger and Stephen Farrell of The New York Times.

A Section on 06/17/2016