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David Amess funeral to be held at Westminster Cathedral next month

Cardinal Vincent Nichols will lead the service on 23 November

Rory Sullivan
Wednesday 27 October 2021 00:15 BST
<p>Sir David Amess was murdered on 15 October, 2021.  </p>

Sir David Amess was murdered on 15 October, 2021.

The funeral of Tory politician Sir David Amess will take place at Westminster Cathedral in November, MPs have been told.

The Southend West MP was killed on 15 October in a suspected terrorist attack at a church in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, where was holding a constituency surgery.

The service will be held at Westminster Cathedral, the largest Catholic church in the UK, at 10.30am on Tuesday 23 November.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the head of the Catholic church in England and Wales, will lead the ceremony.

Catholic MPs, peers and parliamentary staff were informed about the details of the event on Tuesday.

It comes after mourners gathered at St Margaret Church, Westminster, last Monday for a memorial service for the 69-year-old father-of-five.

On the same day, Boris Johnson confirmed that Southend would be made a city in honour of Sir David, who had long campaigned for the upgraded status.

Last Friday, Southend held a two minute silence for him, exactly a week after he was killed. It was led by James Duddrige, the Conservative MP for Rochford and Southend East.

“Share your stories with me, the clergy, the mayor, as we try to make sense of what happened and in some small way maybe bring something good of this,” he told the crowd.

The death of Sir David, the sixth MP to be murdered in office since the end of World War II, followed the killing of Labour MP Jo Cox in her Batley and Spen constituency in 2016 by a far-right extremist.

Ali Harbi Ali, 25, has been charged with Sir David’s murder and appeared before a crown court via video-link from Belmarsh prison on Friday.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) believes the murder was a terrorist act, carried out due to “religious and ideological” motives.

Additional reporting by PA

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