British police say an explosion in a taxi outside a hospital, which killed a man, is being treated as a terrorist incident.

Russ Jackson, the head of Counterterrorism Policing in north-west England, said the blast at the Liverpool Women’s Hospital involved an improvised explosive device.

He said “inquiries will now continue to seek to understand how the device was built, the motivation for the incident and to understand if anyone else was involved in it.”

The male passenger in the taxi died in the explosion, and the taxi driver whose actions have been praised, was injured.

"An improvised explosive device has been manufactured and our assumption so far is that it was built by the passenger in the taxi”

Head of Counter Terror North West Unit Russ Jackson confirms explosion in Liverpool was "a terrorist incident”https://t.co/vBq0GasLik pic.twitter.com/h4CLE7ycuf

— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) November 15, 2021

Three men in their 20s have been arrested under the Terrorism Act.

Suspicions were aroused by the timing of the explosion – just before 11am on Remembrance Sunday, the moment people across Britain hold services in memory of those killed in wars.

Liverpool’s mayor Joanne Anderson said the taxi driver locked the doors of his cab so the passenger couldn’t leave.

“The taxi driver, in his heroic efforts, has managed to avert what could have been an absolutely awful disaster at the hospital,” she told the BBC.

Britain’s interior minister, Home Secretary Priti Patel, said she was “being kept regularly updated on the awful incident.”

-AP