Germany, terrorist attack?

[paulpablo]

Looks like an Islamic terrorist attack in Germany.  

They seem to have done a good job stopping this from happening because I'm amazed it didn't happen before.

[ignoramus]

15 dead so far.
The driver was a "fresh to Germany" paki refugee ...

who would have thought?

[Alex K]

Just woke up to this... crap

[abaris]

What I find remarkable is that this attacker is yet another small time criminal turned terrorist. All the recent attacks in Europe have been commited by small time criminals, who have been known to the authorities but not for terrorist activities. Also there seems to be more to that attack. The truck driver is rumored to have been murdered to get hold of his vehicle. Also this attacker tried to get away and obviously wasn't ready to die in the attack.

The sad thing, like with the attack in Nizza, you can't possibly prevent attacks on so called soft targets. Short of cancelling each and every outdoor celebrations, that is.

[Amarok]

And here starts the song and dance again

with the anti Immigration types frothing with xenophobic paranoia and everyone else telling them to calm the fuck down

[abaris]

It's been confirmed that the Polish truck driver has been shot by the attacker to get hold of the vehicle. Obviously that was a crime of opportunity and not a long planned attack. A polish firm sent a shipment of steel to Berlin and it was pure coincidence that the driver couldn't deliver on monday and had to wait for the night. Where he obviously got killed.

[Anomalocaris]

If by crime of opportunity you meant it was unplanned, I don't think that the particular driver murdered having been at the fatal encounter by happenstance clearly indicated hijacking some truck by killing some driver wasn't a scheduled component of a previously thought out plan.

The question is did the perpetrator behave as a result of radicalization?   If one were to look at all newsworthy cases where a lone perpetrator sought to kill and succeeded in killing a large number of people in the western world, one might find the deathtoll resulting such acts motivated by reasons other than radical Islam remains much greater than those motivated by radical Islam.  

If the perpetrator was motivated through radicalization, then the question is did he become radicalized prior to or after coming to Germany.

[abaris]

Got the wrong guy, obviously. It's all over the news by now.

[LastPoet]

Yes, Police admits to have grabbed the wrong guy. Well it happens with the climate of fear of the brown lately. Police was on a lead by a withness. I guess they ruled him out.

[abaris]

That means it gets more mysterious by the hour. Also as far as motif is concerned. It certainly wasn't a planned attack, since that poor guy simply was at the wrong spot at the wrong time. There are also reports that the polish firm had the truck on GPS for the whole time. It seems as if the vehicle had been driven erraticaly for short periods of time between 4 PM and 7 PM. The driver already was incommunicado at the time. It looks as if someone took some driving lessons by himself before embarking on the final attack.