three men were stabbed outside a gay bar. a day of speculation later, the police said what it wasn't.

via Attitude and ClickLiverpool, with statements from Merseyside Police.

Eberle Street is the narrow lane at the middle of Liverpool's gay scene, and at 6.35 on Sunday morning it was still going, because that is what Eberle Street is for. Then three men were stabbed outside G-Bar and the street became a cordon, along with Tithebarn Street and Temple Lane.

All three were taken to hospital. Two were stable, one had minor injuries, and as of Monday morning one of them is still in. Officers recovered a knife at the scene and sent it for forensic examination.

Then, for about twenty-four hours, there was nothing, and the internet did what it does with nothing. Posts went around noting that a manhunt had been launched in one of the most surveilled countries on earth without a single line describing who anyone was looking for, and everybody filled that silence with whichever story they had brought with them.

The answer arrived on Monday morning, and it is duller than all of them. Merseyside Police now say the violence followed "an altercation between two groups inside" the bar, and that they are trying to trace three white male suspects aged from their late teens to early 30s. Detective Chief Inspector Lisa McNaughton also addressed the question nobody in authority had touched for a day: "While the incident happened outside a known LGBTQ+ bar, I want to reassure that community that there is no suggestion from our enquiries so far that the incident has a hate crime element."

Take that at what it is worth, which is neither nothing nor everything. "So far" is doing real work in that sentence, and forces have been wrong about this before. But it is the first thing anyone official has said about the question, and it is worth more than a weekend of guessing.

What is left is three men cut open outside a gay bar at dawn by, police believe, a row that started at the bar. Nobody has been arrested. Merseyside Police are asking anyone who saw it, or filmed it, to come forward on incident reference 26000771554.