What's behind the rise in car attacks in Europe?

After watching a car plow into a crowd in Vancouver, killing 11 people, we are looking at previous incidents where vehicles have been used as weapons in Europe.

At least 11 people were killed and dozens more injured after a man drove his car into a crowd of people during a Canadian road festival in Vancouver on Saturday night.

A 30-year-old Vancouver man was arrested at the scene, and police said he had a history of mental health issues. The man has been charged with multiple counts of murder in connection with the incident.

There was no early indication of a motive for the attack at the Filipino Lapu Lapu Day festival in Vancouver, but police said it was not a terrorist attack.

The suspect, Kai-Ji Adam Lo, has "a significant history of interactions with police and health professionals regarding mental health issues," said Vancouver Interim Police Chief Steve Rai.

Here we examine other major attacks where a vehicle was used as a weapon. Some have been linked to terrorism and extremism, while others have been blamed on mental illness.

Germany, the latest target

Two people died on February 13 after being injured in a car attack during a trade union demonstration in Munich, writes € news.

Some 39 people were injured in the attack and police arrested a 24-year-old man from Afghanistan who had come to Germany as an asylum seeker. Prosecutors said he had an extremist Islamic motive.

On December 20, 2024, at least five people were killed and more than 200 injured when a car crashed into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, eastern Germany.

Police arrested a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who had renounced Islam and supported the far-right AfD party.

In June 2022, a 29-year-old man drove a car into a crowd of people in Berlin, killing one person and injuring dozens more. Police identified the driver as a 29-year-old man of German-Armenian origin.

2017, a year of high-profile attacks

As it turns out, driving a car was not a method of choice for mass-casualty attacks for several years before the increase in the number of such attacks in Germany in recent years. However, the period between 2016 and 2017 was filled with attacks by cars on pedestrians, mainly in the United Kingdom.

In August 2017, a man drove a van into people on the busy Las Ramblas boulevard in Barcelona, ​​killing 14 people and injuring others. The group calling itself the Islamic State claimed responsibility. Members of the same cell carried out a similar attack in the nearby tourist town of Cambrils, killing one person, the Telegraph reports.

Two attacks occurred just days apart in June 2017 in the British capital. On June 19, Darren Osborne, a man radicalized by far-right ideas, drove a van into worshippers outside a mosque in Finsbury Park, killing one man and injuring 15 others. Osborne was sentenced to life in prison.

Before the Osborne attack, three attackers drove a van into pedestrians in London on June 3 of the same year, before hitting people in nearby Borough Market. Eight people were killed and the attackers were shot dead by police.

On March 22, 2017, British man Khalid Masood drove an SUV into people on Westminster Bridge in London, killing four people, then fatally stabbed a police officer guarding the Houses of Parliament. Masood was killed by police.

In Berlin, another attack occurred in December 2016, when Anis Amri, a rejected asylum seeker from Tunisia, rammed a hijacked truck into a Christmas market in the German capital, killing 13 people and injuring dozens more. The attacker was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.

In neighboring France, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a French resident of Tunisian origin, drove a rented truck for about 2 kilometers along a crowded promenade on the French Riviera coast during the Bastille Day holiday on July 14, 2016, killing 86 people in the deadliest attack of its kind. He was killed by police, but eight other people were sentenced to prison for helping to organize the attack.

Notably, the first large-scale attack of this kind in recent decades occurred in the Netherlands: on 28 April 2009, former security guard Karst Tates drove a car into spectators at an event in Apeldoorn, attempting to hit an open-top bus carrying members of the Dutch royal family. Six people were killed, and Tates died of his injuries the following day.

“You just need a means of transportation”

Rand, a global nonprofit political think tank, published a report in 2021 examining the rise of attacks using vehicles for the European Commission. “This tactic requires little or no training, requires no special skills, and has a relatively low risk of early detection,” the report said. According to Rand, Europe and the United States account for almost three-quarters of the attacks.

Bart Schuurman, professor of terrorism and political violence at Leiden University, said the simplicity of car-ramming attacks was key in a period of tighter surveillance and gun restrictions: "all that is required is a means of transport."

Car attacks have become the main mode of mass casualty attacks in Europe, alongside knife attacks, he said. “This is a sign that access to firearms and explosives has become very difficult. There was a big change after 2001 – counter-terrorism became a big priority in Europe too, so they saw a shift to lighter methods that don’t cause alarm,” Schuurman added.

"A car, a knife – these are everyday objects, it's often very unclear whether someone has bad intentions with them, until it's too late," he added.

"These attacks can be very deadly, but they are also a sign of desperation. Bomb and gun attacks are vulnerable to infiltration, to eavesdropping. We know that the jihadists have said: keep it simple, use a means of transport, a knife, just make sure you can carry out the attack," the professor declared.

Schuurman said that while the method of attack originated with Islamist terrorist groups, it was "very quickly adopted" by the far right, especially with the 2016 Charlottesville attack, when a white supremacist killed one person and injured 35 others after driving his car into a crowd of peaceful protesters.

"There are clear signs of organizations looking at each other and copying," he said, adding that even those who are not "ideologically aligned. They will have seen it in the news and may think - this is easy to do."

What can governments do to prevent these types of attacks? Policing, installing security barriers for cars around public spaces and intelligence operations are important, Schuurman said, although he added that the latter "come with concerns about profiling."

"We already do a lot of this, and there are a significant number of individuals who are arrested before they can carry out such an attack. But we cannot guarantee 100 percent security," he concluded. /Telegraph/