Stabbing attacks in UK, Holland leave questions about motive
A stabbing in the UK was described as “terror-related” after three were killed Saturday. By Sunday afternoon the perpetrator was named as Khairi Saadallah, a security threat reportedly known to MI5, the security services. He has been arrested on suspicion of murder.
“Police are not currently treating the incident as terror-related but counter terrorism officers were called,” the BBC noted earlier. The report also said the “man arrested at the scene is thought to be Libyan.” Anadolu media in Turkey quoted Sky News as claiming the incident was “terror-related,” leading to confusion in media throughout the Middle East, which initially described the incident as a potential terror attack.
A second incident in Holland in the city of Leeuwarden involved an alleged “assassination attempt” against a Kurdish Iranian activist. He was seriously injured in the Friday attack. His name was given as SadeghZarza and being a member of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan. Stabbed up to 15 times by an Iranian suspect, he has survived. Iran has carried out numerous assassinations in the past in Europe against dissidents.
Zarza is the nephew of Abdulrahman Ghassemlou, another prominent Iranian Kurdish leader who was murdered in 1989 in Vienna by Iranian regime assassins. Wladimir Van Wilgenburg wrote about the incident at Kurdistan 24. He notes that Zarza came to the train station to meet a man that had asked for financial assistance. The man, waiting with an unsuspecting bouquet of flowers, stabbed him immediately. The assassin apparently “surrendered himself” without a struggle to police when they arrived, hinting that he was a professional, not a crazed man.
The Kurdstan24 report notes that this is one of several recent attacks in the Netherlands by alleged Iranian agents. They hunted down an Ahwazi dissident in 2017 and a member of another group in 2015. This illustrates how Iran’s regime may operate throughout Europe seeking to silence opposition leaders.
The two stabbing attacks, one initially thought to be terror and the other an apparent assassination, show that knives can be an increasingly deadly form of attack. They also reveal that in general, the number of terror attacks has diminished across the European Union from the previous spike in 2015.