Westminster 22/3

In 2016, it was Brussels 22/3 and one year later it is Westminster 22/3. A terror attack in the heart of London left five dead and nearly 40 injured

The London terror attack is a developing story and is reminiscent of the 2001 Indian Parliament attack though on a relatively lesser scale. The incident has taken place on the first anniversary of the Brussels attacks carried out by by Islamist militants that killed 32 people.

An assailant believed to be an Islamist (owing allegiance to ISIS) stabbed a policeman and was shot by police just outside Britain's parliament building in London on 22nd March around 2.40 pm in what police described as a "terrorist incident." It was later announced that the policeman Keith Palmer, 48 succumbed to his injuries.  It was reported earlier that two people died in the incident, according to Sky News, but the total number of casualties was unclear. Later it was reported that five persons including the police officer and the assailant were among those dead and around 40 were injured.

Amid confusing scenes, it appeared the incident may have unfolded in several locations, including on the nearby Westminster Bridge where eyewitnesses said a car had crashed into pedestrians. A 4x4 vehicle ploughed into the railings near Westminster Hall after mowing down pedestrians on the bridge.

Source: NYT Terrain and aerial imagery by Google

The yellow arrow indicates the route taken by the terrorist on Westminster bridge; the two yellow circles are the places where the car crashed and where the assailant was shot and the red spots show where the pedestrians were wounded.

Reuters’ reporters inside the parliament building heard loud bangs and shortly afterwards saw two people lying on the ground in a courtyard just outside, within the perimeter of the parliamentary estate.

A Reuters’ photographer said he saw at least a dozen people injured on Westminster Bridge, next to parliament.

His photographs showed people lying on the ground, some of them bleeding heavily and one apparently under a bus.

Witness reports suggested the assailant and the stabbed policeman were the people seen lying on the ground just outside the parliamentary building by Reuters reporters.

The House of Commons, which was in session at the time, was immediately suspended and lawmakers were asked to stay inside.

Prime Minister Theresa May was safe after the incident, a spokesman for her office said. He declined to say where May was when the attack took place.

Journalist Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail newspaper told LBC radio that he had witnessed the stabbing of the policeman and the shooting of the assailant from his office in the parliament building.

"He (the assailant) ran in through the open gates ... He set about one of the policemen with what looked like a stick," Letts said. Letts, said he saw a man in black attack a police officer outside Parliament before being shot two or three times as he tried to storm into the House of Commons, the Press Association reports.

"The policeman (Keith Palmer) fell over on the ground and it was quite horrible to watch and then having done that, he disengaged and ran towards the House of Commons entrance used by MPs (members of parliament) and got about 20 yards or so when two plain-clothed guys with guns shot him." He added: “As this attacker was running towards the entrance two plain clothed guys with guns shouted at him, what appeared like a warning, he ignored it and they shot him two or three times and he fell.” 

Reuters’ reporters inside parliament saw a large number of armed police, some carrying shields, pouring into the building.

In Edinburgh, the Scottish parliament suspended a planned debate and vote on independence as news of events in London came in.

Britain is on its second-highest alert level of "severe" meaning an attack by militants is considered highly likely.

The identity of the suspected Islamist militant has not been released by the London Police for reasons best known. It is rather stupid on part of the authorities to suppress the identity merely because of suspected ISIS links. Suppression of essential information leads to speculative reporting. The attacker was briefly identified by Channel 4 News as a prominent British-born Islamist extremist but the broadcaster later reversed its report after other journalists disputed it on Twitter. BBC Pakistan correspondent Secunder Kernani said a “reliable source” told him that the man Channel 4 named was in jail.

The Islamist link was apparent from the choice of weapons, namely using a vehicle to plough into a crowd as in Nice and Berlin and a knife for stabbing which has been used in the past by Islamist terrorists in Israel and elsewhere. The ISIS link is further reinforced by the choice of the target, namely, the heart of democracy, the British Parliament and a street with a lot of pedestrians. ISIS, the Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Toiba choose high value targets and public places frequented by a lot of people at any given point of time.

The police again had no business to refer to the attack as a "Lone Wolf Attack" or that only a lone attacker was involved in the absence of detailed investigations.

In May 2013, two British Islamists stabbed to death soldier Lee Rigby on a street in southeast London.

In July 2005, four British Islamists killed 52 commuters and themselves in suicide bombings on the British capital's transport system in what was London's worst peacetime attack.

Update: The identity of the assailant was released by the authorities. The name of the assailant is Khalid Masood, 52 from West Midlands who had a  criminal record but was not considered as a terror threat. According to sources, the terrorist was killed by the protection officers of Defence Secretary Michael Fallon.

Update 25th March: According to security officials, the terrorist Khalid Masood was not a “lone wolf” and others had played a key part in indoctrinating him and helping him to carry out the deadly attacks in Westminster on 22^nd March.

The disclosure that the British-born Muslim convert was likely to have been part of a wider conspiracy came as armed police detained 11 people in raids across the country with two of the arrests, including that of a woman, Rohey Hydara, a Gambian woman with whom he was living, described as “significant” in the investigation.

A Repeat of Nice in Berlin - Terror Attack on Christmas Market

Berlin, on the night of 19^th December 2016, became a target of an Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terror attack when a Scania R-450 semi-trailer truck belonging to a Polish delivery company Ustugi Transportowe (Transport Services) laden with steel beams meant to be delivered to ThyssenKrupp, plowed into a crowd of holiday revelers at the market in front of Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at Breitscheidplatz killing 12 people and injuring 48 others. The black semi-trailer with Polish license plates drove into the sidewalk at the market at about 8.00 pm barreling more than 200 feet, according to eyewitnesses. 

The Berlin Attack was identical to the attack carried out by a Tunisian-born French citizen during the Bastille Day celebrations in July 2016 in Nice, France which claimed the lives of 86 innocent civilians. In both the attacks the perpetrators were of Tunisian origin and the responsibility for the attacks was claimed by the ISIS. The attacker, later identified as a 23 year old Tunisian, Anis Amri took over the truck driven by a Polish citizen identified as Lukasz Urban before driving into the crowd at the Christmas market. A suspect, Naved Baloch of Pakistani origin was detained briefly but was released for want of evidence. Amri was known to German intelligence and was under surveillance for trying to acquire weapons. (It is indeed strange that most of the jihadi terrorists responsible for carrying out attacks in Europe since January 2015 have had a police record or were placed under surveillance of intelligence agencies at some point of time). After the truck attack in Nice and many attacks in Israel using the same modus operandi, namely, ramming a vehicle into a crowd, or using Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device (VBIED), the European agencies ought to have been alert to movement of suspicious heavy vehicles near markets and religious congregations. In fact the training manuals of ISIS and Al Qaeda contain details of carrying out a successful vehicular ramming attack. 

Al-Qaida published several training manuals on how to carry out a successful vehicular ramming attack since Inspire magazines volumes 1 & 2 (2010). In the 13^th (2014) and 16^th (2016) Volumes of Inspire magazine, the organization provided examples of successful vehicular ramming attacks, noting the ramming of Canadian soldiers and the attack in Nice as exemplary lone wolf attacks.

ISIS as well published its own “user manuals” on how to carry out a successful vehicular ramming attack; the most recent of which was published just a few weeks before the Berlin attack (Rumiyah, Issue 3, November 7, 2016). The publication calls for the individuals to initiate vehicular ramming attacks, pointing out the benefits of such attacks, giving detailed instructions on how to select and operate the vehicles and recommending the types of targets.

The advantages, according to the article, of using vehicles for vehicular ramming attack are the fact that a vehicle can serve as 'a weapon' which is easy to use for anyone who knows how to drive, it is significantly less suspicious than other weapons (such as a knife, for example), it is easy to obtain and can cause a large numbers of casualties. The organization summarizes these advantages: “It is for this obvious reason that using a vehicle is one of the most comprehensive methods of attack, as it presents the opportunity for just terror for anyone possessing the ability to drive a vehicle. Likewise, it is one of the safest and easiest weapons one could employ against the kuffar, while being from amongst the most lethal methods of attack and the most successful in harvesting large numbers of the kuffar”.

ISIS notes that the vehicle of choice to carry out these attacks needs to be heavy weight and as large as possible while still being able to reach high speeds. Vehicles can be bought, rented, lent, and if necessary, even acquired by theft or kidnapping of the driver.

Finally, the article provides several targets of choice such as outdoors events and/or markets, pedestrian crowded streets, festivals, parades and political rallies.[1]

To contend or conclude that the attacks in Nice and Berlin were “ISIS inspired” lone wolf attacks is utterly idiotic. The Berlin attack is still under investigation and as yet it is not clear as to how the perpetrator or perpetrators got hold of the truck which was used in the attack. This attack seemed to have been carefully planned and executed and the target, namely, the Christmas market was not randomly chosen. This is evident from the extract given above.

The writing was on the wall!

 

Europe had been on the crosshairs since the beginning of January 2015 when the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo was attacked by Islamist gunmen. This incident was followed by the Kosher Market hostage taking and later the November 2015 attacks in Paris and the Brussels airport bombings in March 2016. Germany itself witnessed some not so major terrorist incidents in 2016 and it was not a question of if but when Berlin would be targeted by ISIS.

In the beginning of December 2016, European Union’s law enforcement agency Europol warned that some intelligence services anticipated that several dozen people directed by the ISIS may be in Europe to commit terrorist attacks. Europol also stated in addition to France and Belgium, all other EU member states which were part of the US-led coalition against the Islamic State may be targeted by terrorists. Notwithstanding these alerts or warnings, Germany was unable to thwart the present attack indicating a failure of some sort, either in coordination between various security agencies within the German Republic or the threat assessment level pertaining to individuals who pose grave threat to national security. For years, according to critics  a lack of information-sharing was slowing down and weakening the effectiveness of Germany’s patchwork of federal and regional security agencies.

Within Germany’s federalized system, each of the country’s 16 states has its own state police force as well as its own domestic intelligence service, in addition to various federal agencies operating nation-wide.

The core problem, officials say, is that — partly due to outdated IT systems, and partly to Germany’s strict laws regarding data privacy — information obtained by investigators is currently stored by different services in separate information pools, which exist in parallel.

“You could say, ‘too many ‘pools’ spoil the broth,’” De Maizière said in a November 2016 address to the annual conference of Germany’s Federal Criminal Office (BKA). “They unnecessarily duplicate data and include the high risk of inconsistent, incomplete and inaccurate data.”

Officials can only access individual pools, rather than all of them at the same time, De Maizière complained back in November.

Likewise, on the European level, he has complained about the lack of data-sharing between EU intelligence and security agencies.

Germany’s Federal Crime Office (BKA) is monitoring 530 so-called Gefährder, radicalized individuals who officials suspect may commit serious crimes such as a terror attack or murder.

It is highly unlikely that redressing this defect would secure Germany from future attacks. The resources of the federal and state agencies have been stretched, thanks to the Merkel government’s foolish and short-sighted policy of allowing more than a million so-called refugees from the war zones of Syria and Iraq to enter the country without any system of vetting or verification. Thus the agencies were burdened with a herculean task overnight. (Around 1.2 million Muslims entered the country between May 2011 and the end of 2015).

It must be emphasized that the European governments must concentrate their efforts on tackling Islamist extremists owing allegiance to the ISIS rather than on Islamophobia.

[Update: Anis Amri, the Tunisian attacker was reportedly shot dead by Italian Police officers in the Italian city of Milan during a routine identity check on 23^rd December 2016.

What started as a routine police check ended in the death of the Berlin attacker. Two police officers on a regular early morning patrol spotted a man acting suspiciously at 3:00 a.m. local time at a train station in Milan's working class neighborhood of Sesto San Giovanni. They approached the man, unaware of the fact that he was Anis Amri and asked for his papers. He reached into his pocket and instead of pulling out documents, he pulled out a .22-caliber pistol and shot one of the officers, who returned fire and shot him dead].

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[1] The Berlin Vehicular Ramming Attack – What We Know & Insight from ICT Experts, International Institute for Counter Terrorism, IDC Herzliya, Israel

Terror Attacks in Germany - A Wake-up Call for Merkel

Having opened the doors to migrants from conflict zones particularly Syria and Iraq, terror attacks were only inevitable. It is anybody's guess how the people of Germany would react to the spate of attacks and what steps the German government takes to thwart future attacks.

Munich Olympia Mall Shooting

 

After about 44 years, terror re-visited Munich. In September 1972, Palestinian gunmen belonging to the Black September Organisation killed 11 Israeli athletes who were staying in the Olympic Village at Munich.  On 22 July 2016, an 18-year-old German of Iranian descent Ali David Sonboly opened fire in the vicinity of the Olympia Shopping Mall (Olympia-Einkaufszentrum, OEZ) in the Moosach district of Munich. Incidentally the Munich mall is near the stadium for the 1972 Olympics and the athletes' village. The German police said that at least 9 people were killed in the shooting that was carried out by a lone gunman who is then reported to have committed suicide around 1 kilometre from the scene of the attack. The shooting began in Hanauer Straße and then shifted to the Riesstraße — streets close to the Olympia shopping center — before moving into the mall itself shortly before 6 p.m., according to the official Facebook page of the Munich police. 

The shooter had lived in Munich for at least two years. Munich police chief Hubertus Andra told a press conference it was “totally unclear” whether the incident was an act of terror, though eye witnesses reported that the shooter screamed “Allahu Akbar” while firing.

Twenty-one people, including several children, were taken to the hospital. Police reported that 16 were injured and three were in a critical condition.

The Würzburg Attack

The attack came just days after a 17-year-old asylum seeker Muhammad Riyad went on a rampage with an axe and a knife on a train on Monday near Würzburg, also in Bavaria, injuring five people before being shot dead by the police.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere had said that assailant was believed to be a "lone wolf" who appeared to have been "inspired" by Islamic State group but was not a member of the jihadist network.

The train attack triggered calls by some politicians to impose an upper limit on the number of refugees coming into Germany, which accepted a record 1.1 million migrants and refugees last year, many through Bavaria.

On 24^th July 2016, a knife-wielding attacker sparked panic, after killing a woman near a Turkish fast-food kiosk in downtown Reutlingen, according to German mass-circulation newspaper "Bild".

Five people were reportedly wounded in the attack and brought to the hospital. A car driver spotted the attacker running away from the scene and hit him with his vehicle, allowing police to grab hold of the suspect and make an arrest, according to a police spokesman cited by the DPA news agency. Police stated that the suspect was a 21-year-old male refugee from Syria known to authorities for previous acts of violence.

Ansbach Bombing

On the night of 24^th July 2016, a 27-year-old Syrian man who had been denied asylum in Germany a year ago died when a bomb he was carrying exploded outside a music festival in Ansbach, Germany. Twelve people were wounded in the attack. Bavaria interior minister Joachim Herrmann said the man, carrying a backpack, had apparently been denied entry to the Ansbach Open music festival shortly before the explosion. A large area around the site of the explosion, in the city of around 40,000 people, was still sealed off hours after it occurred outside a restaurant called Eugens Weinstube. More than 2,000 people were evacuated from the festival after the explosion, police said. The bomber was known to police in Ansbach for previous offenses, including drug crimes, Herrmann said. He had also twice attempted suicide before the bombing. 

Ansbach is home to a US army base and the 12th Combat Aviation Brigade with around 5,000 members of the military living there along with civilians, contractors and retirees. There are three military installations in the Ansbach area, according to the garrison's website. A spokesman at the base said the base had no information about the explosion.

[Update: BBC - The Syrian man who blew himself up in Ansbach, Germany, on Sunday made a video pledging allegiance to the leader of so-called Islamic State, Bavaria's interior minister says.

Joachim Hermann said two phones, multiple SIM cards and a laptop were found with the body of the 27-year-old asylum seeker or at his accommodation.

The man threatened a "revenge attack" on Germans in the video, he said.

IS has claimed it was behind the attack and the Syrian was an IS "soldier".

The attacker announced in the video "in the name of Allah that he pledged allegiance to [IS chief] Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi... and announced an act of revenge against Germans because they were standing in the way of Islam," Mr Hermann said.

Further bomb-making equipment was found at the asylum seeker accommodation where the man was living, including a fuel canister, hydrogen peroxide and batteries]. 

The mall shooting occurred just eight days after 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel used a truck to mow down 84 people, including children, after a Bastille Day fireworks display in Nice, the third major attack on French soil in the past 18 months.

In March 2016, Islamic State claimed suicide bombings at Brussels airport and a city metro station that left 32 people dead.

In May, a mentally unstable 27-year-old man carried out a knife attack on a regional train in Bavaria, killing one person and injuring three others.

Tensions between native and immigrant Germans have been on the rise since Germany accepted nearly one million refugees during last year's migrant crisis, in which Bavaria was on the front line.

Although it has been France and Belgium that have been hit by recent atrocities, Germany shares many of the same vulnerabilities.

Just like France and Belgium, Germany has seen significant numbers of its residents join the flow of international jihadists to Iraq and Syria. The most recent figures estimate more than 700 men and women from the country may have left to join extremist groups such as Islamic State and many are likely to have later returned home.

Last month, the German justice ministry admitted the federal prosecutor was conducting 120 investigations into more than 180 suspects and defendants "in connection with the Syrian civil war for their membership or support of a terrorist organisation".

Germany's links to Islamist terrorism go back decades, long before the current troubles.

A small group of radical Middle Eastern Islamists formed in the 1990s known as the Hamburg cell produced three of the 9/11 hijackers.

More recent incidents have included an alleged plot by four suspected Islamic State members last month to launch suicide bombings in the city of Dusseldorf. 

Intelligence agents last year reportedly foiled a plot to detonate three bombs inside a Hanover football stadium during an international friendly.

But social tensions arising from the large influx of refugees have also fuelled a sharp rise in popularity for extreme and sometimes violent far-Right groups.

The police and the German government have repeatedly claimed that except for the July 18 axe attack, none of the other attacks bore any signs of connections with the Islamic State or any other terrorist groups. The Munich shooter apparently had a history of mental illness. However the Syrian responsible for the machete attack in Reutlingen did not have any psychiatric problem. The question that must logically follow is why is that in most of the recent attacks that have taken place in Europe and in Germany, the attackers or the accomplices have always been Muslims either from North Africa or the Middle East and followers of the radical Salafi Islam propagated by the ISIS. Are the governments in the West blind to this fact? Did they try to determine how and where the attackers were radicalized? 

The answer to this question partially lies in the report published in the German daily newspaper "Die Welt" wherein the German Criminal Police Office (BKA) reported a significant increase in Islamist threats. The agency tracked almost 500 threats in the past year. It had tracked 497 instances of "threats" or individuals with extremist views who could be suspected of carrying out terrorist attacks. The agency added that an additional 339 Islamists were also being tracked as "relevant persons," or individuals who may assist and sympathize with terrorist causes.

The report said that the development marked a significant increase from numbers dating back to January 2015, when only 270 potentially violent Islamist individuals were registered in Germany.

Austria's domestic intelligence agency also reported that the number of suspected Islamists in the country had risen, citing increased activity within the "Muslim Brotherhood" terrorist group. The "Kleine Zeitung" daily newspaper examined a particular increase in the state of Styria.

Focus must be on Radical Islam and not Islamophobia

The editor-in-chief of the French satirical magazine "Charlie Hebdo," Gerard Biard, said that too much tolerance was partly to blame for the rise in Islamism across Europe, accusing the political left of being complicit. He said it was "scandalous" that leftwing movements were more interested in defending "Muslims wearing the Burka than in equal pay."

"Islamic propaganda has managed to convince us that criticizing Islamism equates to criticizing Islam itself and therefore qualifies as racism," Biard wrote in a speech cited in Berlin.

European governments need to start acknowledging the fact that they have made a colossal blunder by allowing all and sundry to enter Europe under the garb of refugees. Strangely criminals, drug peddlers and terrorists have made their way to Europe, thanks largely to Angela Merkel’s myopic policy. They need to further acknowledge that these so-called ‘refugees’ pose a very serious threat to European security and its liberal values and freedom. The Ansbach bomber was a Syrian refugee whose application for asylum was rejected, the machete-wielding Syrian who killed a pregnant woman at Reutlingen and the axe wielding teen Muhammad Riyad who attacked passengers at Würzburg will do little to convince Germans that ‘refugees’ don’t pose a serious security risk. Trying to pass off every terror attack as a hate crime or the attacker/s had history of mental illness will undermine West’s war against the ISIS inspired terror attacks at home. (It is reported that from the Orlando shooter to the Nice attacker Bouhlel and the Ansbach bomber had mental problems. Some analysts such as Max Abrahms have termed them "loon-wolves). Europe must start focusing on the domestic jihadi threat posed by its own citizens and those who have entered the continent posing as refugees and stop worrying about Islamophobia.  

 The biggest threat to Europe is radical Islam, not Islamophobia.