Wednesday 25 April 2018

TERRORIST ATTACKS USING VEHICLES


In 1975, I was invited by the United Nations to speak at the Fifth United Nation Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the treatment of Offenders at the UN headquarters in Geneva Switzerland. One of my speeches was on terrorism.

The United Nations had proposed to the thousand delegates of over a hundred nations that a Transnational Tribunal be created to try terrorists who have been captured. I was the only person who spoke against the concept because of the jurisdictional problems that would ensue. I presented a scenario in which this concept could fail. The following day, the delegates voted against the concept. Three years later, the scenario I previously envisioned actually occurred and when the terrorists ended up in the Italian’s hands, they set the three terrorists free just as I had forecasted. 


After my speech, I was approached by the Palestinian Liberation Organization‘s official observer to the United Nations. The UN previously gave its approval that the PLO could have Observer status at all UN Congresses just as the UN gave its approval in which I also would have Observer status at similar UN Congresses. Later, we  (judges, lawyers, parole officers, wardens, police officials and criminologists were classed by the UN as Individual Experts.  


To make a long story short, as a result of my talks with the PLO observer during my two meetings with him, the chairman of the PLO, Yasser Arafat agreed to the terms that I had  proposed. The PLO would no longer sanction terrorism and would publicly condemn it and he would make sure that no Palestinians would commit any further acts of terrorism in future Olympic Games like they did in the Munich Olympic Games. He kept his word to me and the Government of Canada kept my word to him that the PLO could have an office in our capital city which is Ottawa. Alas, after he died and years later, the PLO has been sanctioning acts of terrorism in Israel.  

In 1985, I gave a speech on terrorism at the Seventh UN Congress held in Milan, Italy. The Italian government having read my speech ahead of time asked the chairman of the session dealing with the topic of terrorism if I could give my speech from the dais instead from my desk on the main floor. The reason for that request was that a television station wanted to televise my speech so that it could be shown on TV that night. (which it was) 

My speech was titled Terrorists—How to deal with them. At the end of my speech I said, “When a terrorist kills an innocent person; there are three victims The first victim is the primary victim. His or her family and friends are the secondary victims and the rest of us are also victims because when an innocent victims dies at the hands of a terrorist, a little of each of us also dies.”

In 200, I was invited to speak at the Tenth UN Congress held in Vienna in Austria. The topic of my speech was The Problem of Cyber Terrorists.

In 2005, I was invited to speak at the Eleventh Congress of the United Nations being held in Bangkok, Thailand. One of my speeches   was titled Managing the Explosives. I had suggested that the manufacturers of explosives insert inert chemicals in the explosives so that when terrorists use the explosive for terrorist purposes, the residue of the bombings will show who the manufactures of the explosives were and from that knowledge, it may lead to the terrorist organization that used the explosives.

Since the year 2000, as many as 180 people have been killed in the entire world from 41 attacks by cars, trucks and vans driven by terrorists and people deemed mentally unstable. That works out to an average of about four people killed per attack, although loss of life is greater in some incidents and less in others. These attacks frequently draw heavy worldwide media coverage.

The general public demands that something must be done  whatever the costs or societal effects. In that sense, terrorism works if precautions aren’t taken to prevent the use of vehicles to murder innocent victims. 

It’s important to understand how rare vehicular terrorism is when determining how far society should go in trying to prevent it and how much should be spent at the local, state/provincial and national level to protect against this frightening but infrequent form of terroristic threat.

The attacks have added urgency to discussions of what can be done to reduce vehicular terrorism. In the lexicon of the security world, these ideas come under the heading of “hostile vehicle mitigation measures,” and they include a large range of possibilities. 

Cities are filled with pedestrians and vehicles and in some cases; separated by mere inches. Many of the measures to reduce vehicular terrorist attacks would be disruptive and costly, and can  easily be circumvented by terrorists. 

When my wife and I visited Washington D.C. we noticed that on Pennsylvania Avenue, large concrete pylons (Bollards) were placed between the road and the sidewalks. They have been placed there to protect the buildings from car bombs. However they would also protect pedestrians from terrorist truck attacks. 

Bollards, or posts were installed on a sidewalk it would prevent any vehicle that jumps the curb from traveling more than 20 or 30 feet on a sidewalk. But this would be a massive undertaking if it was instituted along the sidewalks of every busy street in a large city. 

To place such barriers on the main streets of large cities would  cost each of the cities millions upon millions of dollars. Alas, many cities may have to take that method to protect the pedestrians from rampaging terrorists using vehicles to kill the pedestrians.  

Airline hijackings came to define terrorism in the 1970s, as did suicide bombings in the 1980s. Now the use of vehicles to mow down pedestrians is becoming increasingly commonplace.

More armed police can be deployed to increase surveillance and respond more quickly to an event. However, the time between a moving vehicle suddenly veering into pedestrians and a street filled with casualties is a matter of seconds. By the time the police arrive on the scene, the dirty deed is more or less completed. 

As we all know, in the United States, everyone wishing to purchase a gun, is first investigated by the police to see if anyone wishing to purchase a gun is a criminal, mentally unstable or has been investigated for spousal assault. 

It has been suggested that theoretically, algorithms could be developed to help car, van and truck rental companies identify out-of-the-ordinary renters much like airlines use similar methods to identify passengers thereby creating greater scrutiny. This could prompt crosschecking with existing databases. But it will not prevent terrorists from borrowing or stealing vehicles, or using their own. And it is sure to raise privacy concerns.

One thing that can be done is to have a camera behind the rental agent that will photograph the persons renting a vehicle so that if a renter is a terrorist and the rental vehicle is identified as a rental from such a rental firm, the police will have the face of the terrorist which will assist them in locating him. And if every police officer has a cell phone, the image of the terrorist can appear on the screens of those cellphones thereby making apprehension of the terrorist much easier.   

Various electronic means of remotely shutting down vehicles exist and could possibly be employed to prevent vehicular attacks. Looking ahead, autonomous vehicles could be programmed to prevent their use as weapons. Firms that rent vehicles should have the means of shutting off their rented vehicle’s engine if they receive a call from the police department. 

Every death by a vehicle on our roads is most unfortunate. Of course ordinary traffic fatalities have not led to calls to dramatically place barriers on busy streets regardless of cost. Yet a tiny fraction of the carnage, when caused by terrorists, creates alarm. This leads to another uncomfortable question: are the taxpayers prepared to pay the enormous costs of building and installing barriers protecting pedestrians from terrorists? 

Past terrorist vehicle-pedestrian attacks

A Terrorist vehicle attack took place on May 15, 2011 in Tel Aviv, Israel. It was Naqba Day, in which Palestinians mourn the establishment of Israel in 1948. 

A Tel Aviv court later convicted Issa Islam of murder. Islam, who was the a truck driver, killed a 29 year old Israeli and injured 17 other pedestrians when he drove his truck onto a sidewalk in Tel Aviv the previous year, and then continued driving for two kilometers, hitting pedestrian, Aviv Morag and several vehicles before crashing into an Egged bus. Morag died from his injuries. 

The victim’s father said he had been on the phone with his son at the time of the attack. After the crash, Aviv's phone was cut off so his father was unable to reestablish contact. Aviv's father eventually became Islam's second victim; unable to overcome the depression of losing his son, he ended his own life several months after the terror attack. I don’t know what the terrorist’s sentence was.

On the evening of the 14th 0f July 2016, a 19 tonne cargo truck was deliberately driven into crowds of people celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, resulting in the deaths of 86 people and the injury of 458 others. The driver was Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a  Tunisian resident of  France. The attack ended following an exchange of gunfire, during which Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was shot and killed by the police. The terrorist organization ISIL claimed responsibility for the attack, saying Lahouaiej-Bouhlel answered its "calls to target citizens of coalition nations that fight the Islamic State.

On October 31, 2017, an Islamic terrorist drove a rented pickup truck into cyclists and runners for about one mile (1.6 kilometers) of the Hudson River Park's bike path alongside West Street  from  Houston Street south to  Chambers Street  in  Lower Manhattan, New York City. The vehicle-ramming attack killed eight people and injured eleven others. After crashing the truck into a school bus, the driver exited, apparently wielding two guns (later found to be a paintball gun and a pellet gun). He was shot in the abdomen by a policeman and arrested. 

Acquaintances said Saipov had a bad temper that cost him driving jobs.[13] He was issued traffic citations in Maryland in 2011, in Pennsylvania in 2012 and 2015 and in Missouri in 2016, where records showed he was driving a tractor-trailer. In 2015, federal agents interviewed Saipov about his contacts with two suspected terrorists, but a case was not opened against him. STUPID MISTAKE.  He was convicted and sentence to prison for life. 

The Islamic terror organization ISIL claimed responsibility for the attack in issue #104 of its newsletter, al-Naba, and called Saipov a soldier of the Caliphate who responded to its call to attack citizens of  the  Crusader (Western)  countries  involved  in  the  alliance   against the Islamic State.


On 22 March 2017, a terrorist attack took place outside the Palace of Westminster in London, seat of the British Parliament. The attacker, 52-year-old Briton Khalid Masood, drove a car into pedestrians on the pavement along the south side of Westminster Bridge and Bridge Street, injuring more than 50 people, five of them fatally. He then crashed the car into the perimeter fence of the Palace grounds and ran into New Palace Yard, where he fatally stabbed an unarmed police officer. He was then shot by an armed police officer and died at the scene. 

Part Two of this two part series will be about the terrorist who drove a van into pedestrians in the City of Toronto.  It will appear in my blog on Friday, April 27. 

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