AhlulBayt News Agency - The exercise by Manchester, England, police was meant to be as faithful to a real terrorist attack as possible.
Mallgoers (who were actually volunteers) amble through a food court. The tables at Five Guys are packed. But in a split second, peace dissolves into (fake) chaos, as a man dressed in black fatigues and a balaclava shouts "Allahu akbar" at the top of his lungs four times before detonating a suicide bomb.
In the simulation, people writhe on the floor in "pain," grasping at torn clothes and calling for help. The scene is indeed gruesome, further punctuated by the brap-brap-brapping of another "attacker" shooting at fleeing bystanders with a machine gun.
But it was the use of "Allahu akbar" — "God is great," in Arabic — that had some in Britain feeling as if the exercise was too "faithful."
A wave of tweets followed the event, questioning why the terrorist in the mock blast had to be Muslim, accusing the Manchester police of pandering to stereotypes and reinforcing prejudices, and questioning why police had felt the need to use such a charged phrase in a training exercise. Others shot back that there was no need to be politically correct when training police, and that the simulation hewed closely to the contours of recent attacks in Paris and Brussels.
Greater Manchester Police's Assistant Chief Constable Garry Shewan came forward to apologize for the usage, calling it "unacceptable" in a statement:
"The scenario for this exercise is based on an attack by an extremist Daesh-style organisation [another name for the Islamic State] and the scenario writers have centred the circumstances around previous similar attacks of this nature, mirroring details of past events to make the situation as real life as possible for all of those involved. However, on reflection we acknowledge that it was unacceptable to use this religious phrase immediately before the mock suicide bombing, which so vocally linked this exercise with Islam. We recognise and apologise for the offence that this has caused."
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