The deadly attack on a satirical French magazine on Wednesday that killed 12 people was only the most recent of several around the world, but it was unique because it was so well-planned and executed by trained militants, say counterterrorism experts.
The West hasn’t seen this kind of an attack in recent years, said Anthony Lemieux, an associate professor at Georgia State University.
“That makes it distinct.”
The masked attackers opened fire with assault rifles in the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris and later exchanged shots with police in the street before escaping in a car. They abandoned that car in northern Paris and hijacked a second car.
Charlie Hebdo was firebombed in November 2011, a day after it carried a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad.
The shooting at Parliament Hill in Ottawa in October and inside a café in Sydney in December were different, Lemieux said in an interview. “Australia was random and not planned. Ottawa wasn’t (a random target) but certainly was not as carefully planned out and executed as it could have been and thankfully so.”
In terms of this “particular type of terrorism and this type of attack, Paris is quite significant.”
Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism adviser and an ABC News consultant, told the news channel that the attackers carried out the operation “in a very calm, controlled way. They appear to have fire discipline, not spraying bullets everywhere. They were people who did not look like they were wild, on some kind of spree, but who were accomplishing a military operation.”
Source:: Metro News
