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In almost three months, the second knife attack with an alleged Islamist background: after the murder of a young man in Morges (VD) in mid-September yesterday, the attack on a shopping center in Lugano with two wounded women. After 2011, when a package bomb from a left-wing terrorist group from Italy exploded at Swissnuclear in Olten and injured two women, the first terrorist attacks in Switzerland. And, more recently, the first with a jihadist background. This fall, it seems, Islamist terrorism is back in Europe: Dresden, Paris, Vienna.
The seeds of terrorists persist
Even if the terrorist organization “Islamic State” has been rebuffed militarily in Syria and Iraq and has lost its self-proclaimed caliphate, the seeds that the Islamic State has sown almost all over the world in what is probably an unprecedented propaganda campaign today in day it turns out to be an extremely robust plant. The authorities seem to have known for some time that Switzerland is not immune from this. It goes with the fact that last night the director of Fedpol, Nicoletta della Valle, said: “This attack does not surprise me.” Since 2015, the Federal Intelligence Service (FIS) has classified the terrorist threat in Switzerland as “heightened”, and the terrorist threat has been shaped primarily by IS supporters. Based on the most recent state, 57 people appear on the NDB’s People at Risk list.
According to SRF’s investigation, this also included, at least temporarily, the alleged perpetrator from Lugano. She tried, as Fedpol confirmed this morning, to travel to the Islamic State in Syria in 2017. She fell in love with a fighter there through social media and wanted to meet him. At that time, the Ticino woman could not go beyond Turkey. The Turkish authorities detained the woman and sent her back to Switzerland.
At least since then, the Swiss authorities have known about it. Obviously, offenses of criminal importance cannot be proven. However, she was sent to a psychiatric hospital.
Caliphate defeated – ideology no
The case shows how long an ideological seal can be maintained and an organization, in this case the IS as a terrorist group with a territory dominated by itself, can survive. The caliphate can be defeated, but the ideology obviously cannot. The investigation will have to show how closely the woman was connected to IS executives and what influence the IS fighter with whom she fell in love had on the spot. But that, ultimately, is not decisive from the IS perspective; What is decisive is the fact that Western supporters obviously still feel called upon to carry out terrorist attacks and keep IS alive.
As in the case of the Morges attack (VD), there are again indications that the 28-year-old woman may be mentally disturbed. It will be necessary to clarify in detail what this means and what degree of mental disorder should be assumed. This requires a specialized psychiatric report and should take some time. If she is not declared completely incapable of feeling guilty, for example due to schizophrenia, that too is part of the threatening situation as it presents itself today. That makes the situation even more unpredictable: people who are radicalized and have psychological problems are extremely difficult to assess in terms of their danger.
Daniel Glaus
Inlandredaktor, SRF
