Police in London have seen a weekend of violence, with several knife attack victims fighting for their lives while officers opened a murder probe after a woman was found strangled to death in an apartment in the capital’s east.

On Friday evening, officers in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham were called out to two separate, and apparently unrelated, knife attacks within the space of just 20 minutes in which both victims were stabbed in the face, local media reports.

A triple stabbing in Leyton, east London, on Saturday saw three people assaulted in broad daylight, with eyewitnesses reporting that the children of two of the victims witnessed the attack.

“Just got in to find my neighbour shook up – he just saw a family get stabbed in Leyton. Mother and father in front of their kid. Horrible,” said Londoner Greg Dash, according to the Daily Mail.

Scotland Yard said: “Police were called to Church Road, E10 at 15.37 on Saturday, 5 January following reports of a man injured.

“Officers and London Ambulance Service attended and found a woman with stab injuries and two men with slash wounds.

“They have been taken to an east London hospital for treatment. The woman aged in her thirties is in a critical condition. Both men’s injuries are not life threatening or changing.”

The stabbings took place just an hour after a 26-year-old man was left fighting for his life in an attack which took place just three miles away in Forest Gate, Newham, where the victim was repeatedly knifed in broad daylight.

On Sunday, the Met announced that detectives have opened a murder inquiry after the post-mortem of a woman found dead just before New Year revealed her cause of death to have been compression to the neck.

Khan Says It Could Take Ten Years to Solve London Knife Crime After Fourth Fatal Stabbing in Five Days https://t.co/31OYATiWea — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) November 5, 2018

Officers had found the 50-year-old woman unresponsive at 13.20 on 30 December, when they forced their way into a property in Poplar, where she died just under an hour later in a death which raises London’s total murder rate in 2018 to 133, the BBC notes.

With homicides in the capital at their highest point in a decade, London mayor Sadiq Khan’s approval rating plummeted to its lowest level on record over the last year. But despite public concern over violence and knife crime in the city, the Labour politician has rejected calls for a law and order response to offenders, insisting instead that authorities take a “public health” approach to the crisis.

Office for National Statistics (ONS) data released in October revealed knife crime in London to be at its highest ever level, with a total of 14,987 offences recorded as having taken place in the previous 12 months.

Despite the record figure, which marked a 15 per cent from 2017, a number of British media outlets published hit pieces on UKIP this weekend after the party used social media to complain that “stabbings are now a daily event in Sadiq Khan’s London”.