Lone-wolf terrorism
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- This article is about acts of terrorism. For other uses, see Lone Wolf.
Lone-wolf terrorism takes place outside a command structure and may be unaccountable to the claimed collective cause of a group. Lone-wolf terrorists may be motivated by personal gain or vendetta, or may prefer to act as an individual covert cell within a movement practising leaderless resistance. Lone-wolf terrorism poses a particular problem for counter-terrorism officials, as it is considerably more difficult to gather intelligence on compared to conventional terrorism.
Examples are:
- The Christian Identity adherent, Eric Robert Rudolph, who between 1996 and 1998 launched a series of attacks against civilians in the American south, resulting in the deaths of three people and injuries to at least 150 others.
- Timothy McVeigh, an American domestic terrorist convicted and executed for the April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people and injured hundreds with a bomb-laden truck.
- Baruch Goldstein, previously associated with Kach, who on February 24, 1994 opened fire inside the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, killing 29 people and injuring at least 100.
- The neo-Nazi David Copeland, who became known as the "London nailbomber" after a 12-day bombing campaign in April 1999 aimed at London's black, Asian, and gay communities, killing three and injuring 129.
- Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the "Unabomber", who attempted to fight against what he perceived as the evils of technological progress by engaging in an almost eighteen-year-long campaign of sending mail bombs to various people, killing three and wounding 29.
- Buford O. Furrow, Jr., a member of the white-supremacist group Aryan Nations, who on August 10 1999 attacked a Jewish daycare in Los Angeles, injuring five, and subsequently shot dead a Filipino American US Postal Service carrier.
- On August 4, 2005, Eden Natan-Zada, 19, an armed Israeli soldier who had been AWOL for weeks, shot dead four Israeli Arabs on a bus and wounded 12. An Arab crowd then lynched him. Natan-Zada had recently turned to religious extremism and had deserted his unit after he refused to remove settlers from the Gaza Strip. He was believed to have involvement with the illegal Kach group. Prime minister Ariel Sharon described the incident as "a reprehensible act by a bloodthirsty Jewish terrorist who sought to attack innocent Israeli citizens." [1] However, under Israeli law, only attacks by "enemies of Israel" are considered terrorism, and so Natan-Zada has not been legally recognised as a terrorist nor the people he killed as victims of terrorism (leading to calls for a change in Israeli law) [2].
- On Wednesday, August 17, 2005, in an attempt to disrupt Israel's planned disengagement from the Gaza Strip, Asher Weisgan, a 40-year old Israeli bus-driver, shot and killed four Palestinians and injured two others in the West Bank settlement of Shiloh. The Palestinians worked in the settlement's aluminum factory and two of them had been driven there by Weisgan. He had snatched the rifle used in the slayings from a settlement guard, after threatening him with a knife. The Haaretz newspaper quoted Weisgan as saying before entering a courthouse outside of Tel Aviv, "I'm not sorry for what I did." Ariel Sharon said of the attack, "I view this act of Jewish terror, which was aimed at innocent Palestinians with the twisted thinking that it would stop the disengagement plan, very gravely." [3]
- On November 4, 1995, Yigal Amir, a follower of Meir Kahane, assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and injured a security guard at a rally held in support of the Oslo Accords in Tel Aviv, and was sentenced to life plus 14 years in prison. Amir was a law student at Bar-Ilan University and a right-wing activist who had strenuously opposed Rabin's signing of the Accords.
