• Police called after reports of train stabbings.
• Senior officials inform armed cops enter train.
• Eyewitnesses say one suspect tasered by police.

Multiple people were taken to the hospital after a series of stabbings on a train near Cambridge in eastern England on Saturday, and two men have been arrested, in what Prime Minister Keir Starmer called an “appalling incident.”

British police and ambulance services said several people had been stabbed on the train, which stopped at Huntingdon, with armed officers seen entering the train in videos on social media.

Cambridgeshire police said they were called at 1939 GMT after reports that multiple people had been stabbed on a train.

“Armed officers attended and the train was stopped at Huntingdon, where two men were arrested. A number of people have been taken to hospital,” the police said in a statement.

The East of England Ambulance Service said it mobilised a large-scale response to Huntingdon Railway Station, which included numerous ambulances and critical care teams, including three air ambulances.

“We can confirm we have transported multiple patients to hospital,” it said.

One eyewitness told Sky News that one of the suspects, waving a large knife, was tasered by police.

PM Starmer posted on X that the incident was “deeply concerning.”

“My thoughts are with all those affected, and my thanks go to the emergency services for their response,” he said.

• Trump warns of “guns-a-blazing” strike to “fully wipe out” militants.
• Says goal is to target “terrorists committing horrible atrocities.”
• Instructs “Department of War” to prepare for possible action.
  

US President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he has asked the Defence Department to prepare for possible military action in Nigeria if the Nigerian government “continues to allow the killing of Christians.”

The US government will also immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

Trump said the US may “very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the … Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”

“I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians! WARNING: THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT BETTER MOVE FAST!” he further wrote in the post.

Trump’s smoking statement comes hours after the Nigerian government vowed to keep fighting violent extremism and said it hoped Washington would remain a close ally after Trump added the West African nation to a US watch list over what he said were threats to Christianity.

“The Federal Government of Nigeria will continue to defend all citizens, irrespective of race, creed, or religion. Like America, Nigeria has no option but to celebrate the diversity that is our greatest strength,” its Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.

“Nigeria is a God-fearing country where we respect faith, tolerance, diversity and inclusion, in concurrence with the rules-based international order,” the ministry added.

On Friday, Trump said he was putting Nigeria, Africa’s top oil producer and most populous country, on a “Countries of Particular Concern” list of nations the US finds have engaged in religious freedom violations, which also includes China, Myanmar, North Korea, Russia and Pakistan.

The Republican US President had designated the country a concern during his first term in the White House, but his Democratic successor Joe Biden removed it from the US State Department list in 2021.

“Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria. Thousands of Christians are being killed. Radicals are responsible for this mass slaughter,” he wrote in a social media post on Friday without offering any specifics.

A nation of more than 200 ethnic groups practising Christianity, Islam and traditional religions, Nigeria has a long history of peaceful coexistence with mosques and churches dotting its cities.

But it also has a long history of violence breaking out between groups, in which religious differences sometimes overlap with other fault lines such as ethnic divisions or conflict over scarce land and water resources.

For 15 years, the extremist armed group Boko Haram has also terrorised northeast Nigeria, an insurgency that has killed tens of thousands of people, mostly Muslims.

Trump also asked the US House of Representatives Appropriations Committee to examine the issue and report back to him. A US congressional subcommittee held a hearing on Christian killings in Nigeria earlier this year.

Appropriations Committee Chairman US Representative Tom Cole, in an X post on Friday, said the designation “sends a strong message: the US will not ignore Christian persecution.”

US Vice President JD Vance has defended saying that he hopes his wife Usha — who was raised as a Hindu — converts to Christianity.

A fervent Catholic who himself converted in 2019, Vance said on Friday that pushback against his remarks reek of “anti-Christian bigotry.”

The 41-year-old was asked about raising their three children in an interfaith marriage at a Turning Point USA event honoring assassinated right-wing activist Charlie Kirk at the University of Mississippi on Wednesday.

“Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved in by church? Yeah, I honestly do wish that,” he said.

“But if she doesn’t, then God says everybody has free will, and so that doesn’t cause a problem for me.”

Vance, who has been tipped by President Donald Trump as a likely candidate in the 2028 US election, then responded to criticism of his remarks on social media.

Replying to one critic who accused him on X of throwing the Second Lady’s religion “under the bus” to placate right-wingers, Vance replied: “What a disgusting comment, and it’s hardly been the only one along these lines.”

“She is not a Christian and has no plans to convert, but like many people in an interfaith marriage — or any interfaith relationship — I hope she may one day see things as I do,” Vance wrote.

Usha Vance was born in San Diego to parents who emigrated from India. She told Fox News in 2024 that her parents’ Hindu religion helped make them “really good people.”

Vance was raised as an evangelical in a chaotic and sometimes deprived upbringing that he described in his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”

The couple met at Yale Law School and married in 2014.

Since Vance’s conversion to Catholicism five years later, he has frequently spoken about how his faith has informed his conservative political views.