Vehicle attacks like London easy to organise, hard to prevent

Paris, March 23 : Militants are increasingly turning to vehicle-ramming attacks, like the one staged near Britain’s Parliament on Wednesday, because they are cheap, easy to organise and hard to prevent.Experts say the tactic of mowing people down avoids the need to obtain any explosives or weapons and can be carried out by a “lone-wolf” attacker without using a network of fellow militants — all lessening the risk of alerting security agencies.
“This kind of attack doesn’t need special preparation, it is very low-cost, within anybody’s reach,” said Sebastien Pietrasanta, a French Socialist lawmaker and terrorism expert.
“It is often a case of individual action,” he told Reuters. “They can be quite spontaneous.” Atlest five people were killed and 40 were injured in London after a car ploughed into pedestrians and an attacker stabbed a policeman close to parliament in what police called a “marauding terrorist attack”. The attacker was shot dead.Trucks were used to devastating effect last year against crowds in Berlin and Nice, in contrast to more organised attacks that have already hit Paris and Madrid – as well as London in 2005 – using teams of bombers or gunmen.Islamic State claimed responsibility for both the Nice attack last July, when a truck killed 86 people celebrating Bastille Day, and for the Berlin attack in December, when a truck smashed through a Christmas market, killing 12 people.While no group has yet claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s attacks, Islamic State is under intense pressure in Syria and in Iraq, where one of its last strongholds, Mosul, is under assault from Iraqi forces backed by a coalition that Britain is part of.Islamic State encouraged readers of its online magazine Rumiyah in 2016 to use vehicles to kill and injure.