Terrorism greets the New Year, from Britain to Japan

WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan24) – As the year 2019 began, Britain, Germany, and Japan all saw terrorist attacks, although each attack had a different political motive, and at least two of them may also have involved mental illness.

In the northern British city of Manchester, a British couple suffered serious injuries after being stabbed by a 25-year-old Somali immigrant wielding a large knife. The attacker lived in the city with his parents and four siblings.

The New Year’s Eve assault occurred at Manchester’s train station, and a video, taken by a witness on his cellphone, showed the suspect shouting “Allahu Akbar” and “Long live the caliphate.”

In Tokyo, shortly after midnight on New Year's Day, a 21-year-old Japanese man rammed his car into a narrow street crowded with pedestrians. The attack, in a district known for shopping and tourism, injured nine people, one of them seriously.

The suspect then fled on foot and was captured 20 minutes later. He first boasted to police that he had committed a terrorist act, later explaining that he was protesting the execution in July 2018 of the leader of a Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo, and twelve of his followers.

Aum Shinrikyo was a doomsday cult based on a peculiar synthesis of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity. It held that most of the world would be destroyed in a third world war that would begin with a US nuclear attack on Japan.

In 1995, Aum Shinrikyo carried out a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway that killed 13 people, seriously injured another 54, and affected nearly 1,000 people.

The cult included a number of scientists, and it had a peculiar fascination with chemical and biological weapons.

In 1993 and 1994, Aum Shinrikyo tried to carry out biological attacks, using both anthrax and botulinum. However, the cult failed to produce the bacteria in a harmful form, and its efforts passed unnoticed by authorities.

Germany also experienced a New Year’s terrorist attack. This assault appeared to come from the anti-immigrant far-right

Shortly after midnight, a 50-year-old German man repeatedly drove into holiday crowds, injuring five people, including a Syrian and an Afghan, and leaving one woman with life-threatening injuries.

“The man had the clear intention to kill foreigners,” German police subsequently said, and they suggested that he had a history of mental illness.

Prosecutors are, nonetheless, treating the incident as a terrorist attack, comparing it to radical Muslims who act on their own, the German media reported.

German authorities do not see any contradiction between mental illness and terrorist motives. Rather, a combination of mental illness and racial hatred “was a particularly dangerous profile” in their view, and such individuals can be especially susceptible to extremist agitation.

British police have not publicly suggested that mental illness played a role in the Manchester assault, but they are holding the suspect under the country’s Mental Health Act.

The attack was particularly disturbing to local residents, as it occurred only a short distance from the Manchester Arena, where 22 people were killed by a suicide bomber at an Ariana Grande concert in 2017.

Editing by Nadia Riva