Eleven people were killed and dozens injured after a man ploughed a car into a crowd of people at a street festival in Vancouver on Saturday evening.
A 30-year-old Vancouver man was arrested at the scene, with police saying he had a history of mental health issues. A 30-year-old 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 on Vancouver’s Filipino Lapu Lapu Day festival, but police said it wasn’t a terrorist attack. The suspect, Kai-Ji Adam Lo, has “a significant history of interactions with police and health care professionals related to mental health,” said Vancouver Interim Police Chief Steve Rai.
Here we look at other major attacks where the car has been used as a weapon. Some were found to be related to terrorism and extremism, while others were blamed on mental illness.
Germany the most recent target
Two people died on 13 February after they were injured in a car-ramming attack on a labour union demonstration in Munich.
Some 39 people were injured in the attack, and police arrested a 24-year-old Afghan national who came to Germany as an asylum seeker. Prosecutors said he appeared to have had an Islamic extremist motive.
On 20 December 2024, at least five people were killed and more than 200 were injured when a car slammed into a Christmas market in Magdeburg in eastern Germany.
Police arrested a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who had renounced Islam and supports the far-right AfD party.
In June 2022, a 29-year-old man drove his car into a crowd of people in Berlin, killing one person and injuring dozens. Police identified the driver as a 29-year-old German-Armenian man.
2017, a year of high-profile attacks
Indicatively, car ramming was not a method of choice for mass-casualty attacks for several years prior to the spike in Germany in recent years. Yet, the period between 2016 and 2017 was peppered with vehicle attacks on pedestrians, mainly in the UK.
In August 2017, a man rammed a van into people on the busy Las Ramblas boulevard in Barcelona, killing 14 and injuring others. The so-called Islamic State group claimed responsibility. Several members of the same cell carried out a similar attack in the nearby resort town of Cambrils, killing one person.
Two attacks took place just days apart in June 2017 in the UK capital. On 19 June, Darren Osborne, a man radicalised by far-right ideas, drove a van into worshippers outside a mosque in Finsbury Park, killing one man and injuring 15 people. Osborne was sentenced to life in prison.
Prior to Osbourne’s attack, three attackers drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge on 3 June of the same year before stabbing people in nearby Borough Market. Eight people were killed and the attackers were shot dead by police.
On 22 March 2017 a British man, Khalid Masood, rammed an SUV into people on Westminster Bridge in London, killing four, then fatally stabbed a police officer guarding the Houses of Parliament. Masood was shot dead.
‘No training, no specific skillset’
In Berlin, a December 2016 ramming attack saw Anis Amri, a rejected asylum-seeker from Tunisia, plowed a hijacked truck into a Christmas market in the German capital, killing 13 people and injuring dozens. The attacker was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.
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In neighbouring France, Tunisian-born French resident Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove a rented truck for almost 2 kilometres along a packed seaside promenade in the French Riviera resort on the Bastille Day holiday, 14 July 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 orchestrate the attack.
Notably, the first large-scale attack of this kind in recent decades took place in the Netherlands: on 28 April 2009 former security guard Karst Tates drove a car into parade spectators at an event in Apeldoorn, in an attempt to hit an open-topped bus carrying members of the Dutch royal family. Six people were killed and Tates died of injuries the next day.
Rand, a nonprofit global policy think tank, published a report in 2021 examining the rise in attacks using vehicles for the European Commission. “This tactic requires little or no training, no specific skillset, and carries a relatively low risk of early detection,” it said. According to Rand, Europe and the United States account for nearly three-quarters of the attacks.
The attacks have led city authorities across Europe to install concrete barriers around public spaces, including bollards, benches and flower planters.
Additional sources • AP
