Police confirm a male suspect was shot and died at the scene after they were called to a stabbing near London Bridge. A number of people were injured, and two have died. An explosive device strapped to the suspect's body was fake.

Two members of the public have died and three others were stabbed in an attack on London Bridge which is being treated as "terror-related". The suspect, Usman Khan, was shot dead at the scene.

The man who carried out Friday's stabbing attack at London Bridge was a former prisoner convicted of terrorism offences.

The attacker, named by police as 28-year-old Usman Khan, was out of prison on licence at the time of the attack, in which a man and a woman were killed and three others were injured.

Khan was shot dead by officers after members of the public restrained him. Police declared the attack a terrorist incident.

Khan was known to the authorities, having been convicted for terrorism offences in 2012, according to Met Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu.

"He was released from prison in December 2018 on licence and clearly, a key line of enquiry now is to establish how he came to carry out this attack," he said in a statement.

The Times reported that Khan's release from prison last year came after he agreed to wear an electronic tag and have his movements monitored.

Officers are carrying out searches at an address in Staffordshire, where Khan had been living.

CNN added ISIS has seen a dramatic decline in the recruitment of "foreign fighters." In 2017, the US military said as many as 40,000 people from 120 countries including the UK had joined ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

Today, that number has slowed to a trickle. Very few want to join the losing team.

There has also been a sharp drop in terrorism deaths in Europe, from 150 in 2015 to 13 in 2018, according to European Union figures.

According to CNN, Friday's attack highlights the persistent threat of "lone actor" terrorists who are often radicalized online by ISIS or other militant groups. But their capabilities for lethal action generally do not match those of trained terrorists, like the ones behind the 2015 attacks in Paris, who killed 130 people after training in Syria.

CNN reports that ISIS' territorial defeat earlier this year marks a significant victory given its role as a training ground for terrorists to carry out attacks in the West. What remains are "lone actors" who are often radicalized online. Given what we saw in London on Friday, they too can be lethal -- and in many ways, much harder to detect.

Courtesy BBC and CNN