Lone Wolf (Terrorism)

A lone Wolf (engl. Lone Wolf) is a terrorist type of attack that is not under a command or by a group of material support.

"Lonely wolves" always act as individual perpetrators and without specific third-party mandates, so they determine the time, object and method of their terrorist attack themselves. They usually follow an extremist ideology without coordinating their action (s) with other representatives of the same ideology, and without personal Contact with possible like-minded comrades. This makes "lone wolves" difficult for intelligence services to detect in advance because they do not appear when monitoring suspicious networks.

background

The American neo-Nazi Louis Beam , formerly a member of the Ku Klux Klan , designed the concept of " leaderless resistance " in the early 1990s , with which he Timothy McVeigh , who significantly planned and carried out the 1995 bomb attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City , influenced. The term lonely wolf for a right-wing extremist , racist lone perpetrator was coined by the founder of the White Aryan Resistance , Tom Metzger , in a 'manifesto' in 1995, which says: “I am the underground fighter and independent. I'm in your neighborhood, in schools, police departments, bars, coffee shops, shopping centers, etc., and I'm 'The Lonely Wolf'. "

The concept has been used by anarchist terrorists since 1850 and was later taken up by right-wing extremists. In connection with the propaganda of the deed , which the Russian anarchist Pjotr ​​Alexejewitsch Kropotkin later transformed into a terrorist strategy, acts of violence with which the hoped-for revolution should be fueled seemed justified .

Typology

Raffaello Pantucci from the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence (ICSR) distinguishes four types:

1. Loner (loner)
2. Lone Wolf (lone wolf)
3. Lone Wolf Pack (pack of lone wolves)
4. Lone Attacker (single attacker)

Acts of terrorism by lone wolves

Africa, Middle East, Asia

• Baruch Goldstein , Hebron 1994
• Eden Natan-Zada , 2005
• Alaa Abu Dhein , 2008
• Bomb attack in Aksu (city) , August 2010
• Assassination of Salman Taseer , 2011
• Attack on two mosques in Christchurch ( New Zealand ), 2019

Europe

• Helmut Oxner , 1982
• John Ausonius , 1991/92
• Franz Fuchs , 1993–1997 Bavarian Liberation Army (BBA)
• Kay Diesner , February 1997
• David Copeland carried out a series of three nail bomb attacks in London in April 1999 in 13 days
• Michael Berger murdered the police officers Matthias Larisch von Woitowitz (35), Yvonne Hachtkemper (34) and Thomas Goretzky (35) on June 14, 2000 in Dortmund and Waltrop; see police murders in Dortmund and Waltrop
• Volkert van der Graaf murdered Pim Fortuyn , 2002
• Arid Uka carried out the murder attack at Frankfurt Airport on March 2, 2011
• Anders Behring Breivik carried out the attacks in Norway in 2011
• Mohammed Merah carried out the series of attacks in Midi-Pyrénées , 2012
• Attack on the Jewish Museum of Belgium in 2014
• Attack in Munich in 2016
• Attack in Halle (Saale) 2019

United States

• Theodore Kaczynski , the “Unabomber” 1978–1995
• Eric Rudolph , 1996-1998
• Ali Hassan Abu Kamal, Empire State Building 1997
• The racist Buford O. Furrow Jr. shot a man in Los Angeles in 1999
• Hesham Mohamed Hadayet shot dead two people at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) in 2002
• Naveed Afzal Haq shot and killed a woman in Seattle in 2006
• The anti-abortion opponent Scott Roeder murdered the gynecologist George Tiller in 2009
• Richard Andrew Poplawski shot dead three police officers in Pittsburgh in 2009
• Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad shot and killed a soldier in Little Rock ( Arkansas ), 2009
• James von Brunn shot and killed a guard in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , 2009
• Military doctor Nidal Malik Hasan shot 13 people dead in his 2009 rampage in Fort Hood
• Joseph Andrew Stack III. flew his Piper PA-28 into a US Tax Department building in Austin, Texas, killing a tax officer in 2010
• Racist Wade Michael Page shot dead six people in a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin , 2012
• The brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev committed the attack on the Boston Marathon in 2013
• The racist Frazier Glenn Miller Jr. shot dead three people in Overland Park, Kansas in 2014
• Elliot Rodger killed six people in Isla Vista, California in 2014
• Omar Mateen killed 49 people and injured 53 in the Orlando massacre on June 12, 2016

Topicality

In March 2020, the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution warned in a paper on extremists and the COVID-19 pandemic of violent actions by "unattached, also irrational individual actors", so-called "lone actors". It is conceivable that in such a situation individual right-wing extremists could become active in order to “bring about an overthrow in the short term” targeted for “Day X” or to accelerate it through terror or destabilization.

TV reports

• The Terror of the Lonely Wolves , MDR / Das Erste , August 3, 2020 (1 year online)

literature

• Florian Hartleb : "Lone Wolf Terrorism" - New Dimension or Drastic Individual Case? What do we learn from the “Breivik” case in Norway? In: Criminology. Independent journal for criminological science and practice. Volume 67, 2013, No. 1, pp. 25-35.
• Peter R. Neumann : The new jihadists. IS, Europe and the next wave of terrorism. Ullstein, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-430-20203-9 , pp. 25-26, 158-165.
• Armin Pfahl-Traughber : The "Lone Wolf" phenomenon in German right-wing terrorism. An analysis of case studies. In: Sybille Steinbacher (Ed.): Right violence in Germany. On dealing with right-wing extremism in society, politics and the judiciary. Göttingen 2016, pp. 205–220.
• Florian Hartleb: Lone wolves. The new terrorism of right-wing lone perpetrators. Hamburg, Hoffmann & Campe 2018, ISBN 978-3-455-00455-7 .

See also

• Right-wing terrorism
• Fatalities of right-wing extremist violence in the Federal Republic of Germany

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Peter R. Neumann: The new jihadists. IS, Europe and the next wave of terrorism. Ullstein, Berlin 2015, p. 158.
2. ^ Florian Hartleb : Assassination attempt in Munich: The other terror. Die Zeit, October 12, 2017, p. 13
3. ↑ Peter R. Neumann: The new jihadists. IS, Europe and the next wave of terrorism. Ullstein, Berlin 2015, p. 158
4. ↑ Peter R. Neumann: The new jihadists. IS, Europe and the next wave of terrorism. Ullstein, Berlin 2015, p. 22.
5. ↑ ICSR.info (English).
6. ↑ Blood deed in Orlando Expert: Blood bath in Orlando is the wake-up call of the lonely wolves by Ulf Lüdeke Focus Online , June 13, 2016
7. ↑ Maria Fiedler: Conspiracy theories, propaganda, chaos: How right-wing extremists ignite in the Corona crisis. www.tagesspiegel.de, March 27, 2020