London

    The Crossrail line which will pass through and under the capital will be named the Elizabeth Line after the Queen. The line will eventually link Reading and Heathrow to the west of London with Shenfield and Abbey Wood to the east, using a fleet of new 200m-long trains, each with nine walk-through carriages. The central London segment is due to open in December 2018, with the segment between Liverpool Street station and Shenfield due to open in May next year. The full service to Reading is expected to begin in December 2019. At a ceremony in the Bond Street station, the Queen unveiled the purple Elizabeth Line logo which will feature across the network. She took an industrial lift to the site 28m underground, where she saw part of the tunnel and met apprentices working on t...

    A second man from west London has been named as a member of the Isis execution squad spearheaded by so-called “Jihadi John”. The group, known among their captives as “The Beatles” because of their British accents, were led by Londoner Mohammed Emwazi and have been described as some of the most brutal jailors in Isis’s ranks. A second man in the terror cell can now be named as Emwazi’s friend Alexanda Kotey, according to an investigation by Buzzfeed News and the Washington Post, which first named Emwazi as “Jihadi John”. Kotey, a 32-year-old convert who attended the Al-Manaar mosque in Ladbroke Grove, west London, alongside Emwazi, has separately been named by ITV News. The mosque has condemned their actions. The UK Foreign Office has declined to comment on the latest devel...

    Thousands were evacuated from Victoria station during rush hour this morning following reports or an unexploded bomb. Armed police raced to the scene as hordes of commuters were ordered from both the tube and mainline rail station. Pictures and videos on social media showed people flooding from the the station with a heavy police presence outside. Scotland Yard ordered the station evacuated due to an "unexploded device" on a nearby building site. Buckingham Palace Road was partially closed and cordoned off. The Met tweeted: "Officers are in attendance at a building site on Terminus Place, SW1 following the discovery of what is believed to be World War 2 ordnance." The alarm was raised at around 9.30 and the station was reopened by 10am. Local roads and the bus station have...

    Doug Richard arrives at the Old Bailey on Wednesday A former Dragons' Den star met up to 100 girls from a sugar daddy website for Fifty Shades of Grey "dominance and submission" role playing. Millionaire Doug Richard, 57, was a member of the free-to-join "Seeking Arrangements" site, where he admits engaging in a Fifty Shades of Grey role play fantasy with an under-age girl he met on it. Mr Richard, a former business adviser to David Cameron, is on trial at the Old Bailey accused of having sex with and spanking the 13-year-old girl after she travelled to London with a friend to meet him in January last year. Once inside the pre-booked £149 apartment, he asked the older girl if she wanted to be his slave before spanking her younger friend's bare bottom, it is alleged. The te...

    Lutfur Rahman’s lawyers attended the High Court to ask the Court for permission to apply for a Judicial Review into the Election Court’s ruling earlier this year that Lutfur Rahman should be removed from office. They were granted permission to apply for a Review of the Election Court’s decision that Lutfur Rahman’s election was invalid because 101 Muslim clerics had written a letter calling on Muslims to vote for him. The Election Court deemed this to be undue spiritual influence, using a law which had last been used against Irish Catholics at the end of the 19th Century. It is not known when the Judicial Review will be heard. The lawyers had asked for a Judicial Review to be conducted into other aspects of the Court’s ruling, but applications on other grounds were dismiss...

    Three British schoolgirls who left their homes in London to join Isis in war-ravaged Syria are feared to have been killed after their families lost all contact with them. Shamima Begum, 16, Kadiza Sultana, 17, and Amira Abase, 16, all of whom attended Bethnal Green Academy in East London, ran away from home in February last year, purportedly after being radicalised by Isis propaganda distributed online. They travelled to Isis’ “hellishly dangerous” Syrian stronghold of Raqqa and are understood to have maintained contact with their family while living under the terror group’s control. But a lawyer who represents the families of Shamima and Kadiza has revealed that all contact with the girls was lost in mid-December – around the time British, American and Russian warplanes s...

    One of the Hatton Garden burglary gang discovered photographs of a Conservative Cabinet Minister abusing children during a previous break-in, a friend has reportedly claimed. Brian Reader, 76, known as "The Guv’nor", has been convicted of planning the £14m raid, which saw thieves tunnel in to a room containing safety deposit boxes. During a similar burglary in 1971, Reader allegedly found photographs of the “famous politician” abusing children after tunnelling into a Lloyds Bank in Baker Street, London, the friend told the Daily Mirror. “It was a shock for them when they found photographs of a famous politician abusing children,” he said. “The gang were disgusted and left them lying on the floor of the vault for the police to find but nothing was ever done.” Reader and his...

    Kings Cross is London’s most crime-ridden underground station, figures obtained from the British Transport Police have revealed. The statistics, released through a Freedom of Information request and reported by the Evening Standard, reveal 457 crimes have been recorded at the central London station over 12 months from 1 December 2014. Crime at King Cross soared above the capital’s other stations, with 87 violent incidents, 65 public order offences and 25 sex crimes recorded over the year. Over 200 thefts of passenger property were also logged at the station. Incidents of fraud, drugs offences and criminal damage were also recorded. Oxford Circus and Stratford stations both saw the second highest number of crimes, with each reporting 334 incidents over the year. Victoria ra...

    Swedish prosecutors will be allowed to question the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, the South American nation’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patino, has said. Assange has been living in the west-London building since seeking refuge in 2012, as he awaited extradition to Sweden to face prosecutors over rape allegations. Patino told the Ecuadorean radio station Publica that the country was accepting Sweden’s request to interrogate Assange “as long as the sovereignty of the Ecuadoran state and the laws in the constitution are respected”, the Associated Press reported. He suggested that Swedish authorities could provide their Ecuadoran counterparts with the questions and they could be asked in the presence of a Swedish prosecutor. Later on Fr...

    Officers from the Met's Roads and Transport Policing Command have released CCTV footage and images to identify a woman after the attempted stabbing of a teenage boy on a London bus. On 26 December 2015 at about 12:30pm, the 15-year-old boy boarded a Route 133 bus on Brixton Road, Lambeth, with his 51-year-old grandmother. A police spokesman said: "The suspect, who was already on the bus, approached the victim and produced a large kitchen knife, which she attempted to stab the victim with. The victim's grandmother intervened and managed to disarm the suspect, who then got off the bus and fled towards Oval. The victim suffered a minor cut to the stomach, according to police reports. The woman is described as Asian, aged about 20 to 30 years. She was wearing a distinctive hea...