During the morning rush hour of 21 January 2015, a Palestinian man from Tulkarm, West Bank boarded a bus in Tel Aviv and stabbed multiple people in a terrorist attack. After the bus he boarded had driven about 400 meters, the Palestinian attacked the driver, who fought back, before turning to other passengers and attacking them. The bus stopped, with the passengers fleeing, and the Palestinian attacked others too. Israeli police shot the terrorist in the foot and arrested him.
The 2016 Munich knife attack took place on 10 May 2016 when a 27-year-old mentally disturbed man stabbed four men, one of them fatally at Grafing station in the Upper Bavarian town of Grafing, some 32 kilometres (20 mi) from Munich, southern Germany. As the knifer reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar" while stabbing victims at random, first reactions of the German and international media as well as the general public suspected an Islamist attack. On his arrest shortly after the attack, the perpetrator proved to be a mentally disturbed, unemployed carpenter with drug problems and no known ties to Islamist organizations. In August 2017, the Landgericht München II ruled the man to not be criminally liable of the crime and committed him to a closed psychiatric ward.
On 3 August 2016, a mass stabbing occurred in Russell Square, London. Six people were stabbed, one fatally, before a suspect, identified as Zakaria Bulhan, was apprehended by police and charged with murder and attempted murder. The media initially linked the stabbing to terrorism, but later shifted its focus to possible mental disorders.
On 19 December 2016, a truck was deliberately driven into the Christmas market next to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin, leaving 12 people dead and 56 others injured. One of the victims was the truck's original driver, Łukasz Urban, who was found shot dead in the passenger seat. The truck was eventually stopped by its automatic brakes. The perpetrator was Anis Amri, an unsuccessful asylum seeker from Tunisia. Four days after the attack, he was killed in a shootout with police near Milan in Italy. An initial suspect was arrested and later released due to lack of evidence. Nearly five years after the attack, a man who was critically injured during the attack died from complications related to his wounds, becoming the 13th victim. As of December 2023, this attack remains the worst Islamist terrorist attack by number of casualties in German history.
On 6–7 April 2017, two teenage boys aged 15 and 16 went on a rampage in Queanbeyan, New South Wales, Australia, first stabbing a service station attendant to death, then violently attacking four people in a spree that continued for several hours. The attacks were investigated by Australia's Joint Counter-Terrorism Task Force as a possible terrorism-related crime. On 1 May 2020 both males were sentenced. The older received a jail term of 35 years and 6 months, while the younger received 18 years and 4 months.
On May 26, 2017, Jeremy Joseph Christian fatally stabbed two men and injured a third after he was confronted for shouting racist and anti-Muslim slurs at two black teenagers, Destinee Mangum and Walia Mohamed, on a MAX Light Rail train in Portland, Oregon, United States. Two of the victims, Ricky John Best of Happy Valley and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche of Portland, were killed; the third victim, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, survived with serious wounds.
The Hanover stabbing that occurred on 26 February 2016 was a terrorist stabbing of a police officer in Hanover, Germany, by a 15-year-old girl born to a Moroccan mother and a German father. She had been raised under the influence of salafist preachings, as early as 7 years. She had been investigated by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution for preparing a serious crime already in 2014 and had traveled to meet ISIS members in Istanbul in November 2015. It was the first reported attack by an ISIS sympathiser in Germany.
On June 21, 2017, Airport Police Lieutenant Jeff Neville was stabbed in the neck at Bishop International Airport in the city of Flint, Michigan, in the United States. The assailant, Amor Ftouhi, yelled, "Allahu akbar" during the attack. Ftouhi was travelling on a Canadian passport. Numerous law enforcement agencies responded and the airport was evacuated. Bomb sniffing dogs searched the evacuated airport for evidence of a larger-scale attack, but found nothing. Ftouhi was charged with committing violence at an international airport and interfering with airport security. He was later charged with committing an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries. He was found guilty of all three charges in November 2018, and was sentenced to life in federal prison in April 2019.
On 7 March 2018, two stabbings occurred in Vienna, Austria during the evening. A man has been arrested for both attacks. On 11 March 2018, there was a separate stabbing attack at the Embassy of Iran in the city. The Austrian government hardened its asylum policy after the attacks.
On 25 March 2018, 24-year-old Vivien K. was stabbed by a Syrian migrant in Burgwedel, Germany. She received life-threatening injuries and was put into an induced coma. She woke up three days later, with broken ribs and part of her pancreas as well as her spleen removed.
The 2018 Hamburg stabbing attack was an attack on 12 April 2018 in the city of Hamburg, Germany. A man from Niger stabbed his ex-wife and his one-year-old daughter on a station platform. Both victims died. The perpetrator had arrived in 2013 via Lampedusa, seeking asylum in Germany and was granted a residence permit. He lost a custody dispute days before the incident. If he had won, authorities might have permitted him to remain in Germany.
A mass stabbing is a single incident in which multiple victims are injured or killed with a sharp object thrusted at the victims, piercing through the skin and injuring the victims. Examples of sharp instruments used in mass stabbings may include kitchen knives, utility knives, sheath knives, scissors, katanas, icepicks, bayonets, axes, machetes and glass bottles. Knife crime poses security threats to many countries around the world.
Mickey Borgfjord Larsen was a Danish outlaw biker, gangster and member of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club. Larsen was sentenced to eight years in prison in 1989 for the murder of tradesman Erik Dam, who was stabbed to death on an S-train at Rødovre station. Following his release from prison, Larsen joined the Bandidos during the Nordic Biker War in 1996. He rebelled against the club's leadership after the murder of Claus Bork Hansen, an expelled Bandido and close friend of Larsen who was shot and killed by Bandidos members in Vanløse in March 2001. Larsen was subsequently killed by a car bomb in the parking lot of the chapel at Glostrup County Hospital in September 2003. In 2005, two senior Bandidos members were sentenced to life imprisonment for the bombing, which in 2006 was reduced to sixteen years in prison.
On 4 October 2020, a man was killed and another injured during a knife attack in Dresden, Germany. After two weeks, the 20-years-old perpetrator was arrested, Abdullah al-H. H. - a Syrian national who had arrived in Germany in 2015 to seek asylum. He had been sentenced in November 2018 to two years and nine months imprisonment for supporting a terrorist organization and planning an attack with contacts with a militant in Yemen and working on the construction of suicide belts. He had been released from prison in September 2020. Europol classified the attack as jihadist terrorism.
The 2021 Würzburg stabbing occurred on 25 June 2021 in Würzburg, Germany. Abdirahman Jibril, a 24-year-old homeless man of Somalian nationality killed three civilians with a kitchen knife in a Woolworth store and wounded seven others. Minutes later, the police shot the suspect in his leg and arrested him. He had a history of several violent altercations since his 2015 arrival as an asylum seeker in Germany and a one day involuntary commitment into a psychiatric hospital a month before the attack. Islamist motives were suspected; he himself said the attack was 'his jihad'. Another refugee accused him to be an al-Shabaab member, who had killed civilians, journalists and police officers in Somalia, which German authorities could not confirm.
A mass stabbing incident occurred 6 August 2021, on a commuter train in the Odakyu Electric Railway in Tokyo, Japan. Ten people were injured in the incident.
Ken Lee, a 59-year-old man, was fatally stabbed outside the Strathcona Hotel, on York Street, Toronto, at 12:17 am on December 18, 2022. Eight teenage girls were charged with his murder.
On 31 May 2024 at 11:34 am, a man ambushed and stabbed several people at a rally hosted by the counter-jihad and anti-Islam group Citizens' Movement Pax Europa (BPE) in the market square in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. He mortally wounded a police officer, who died two days later, and wounded five other people. The victims included the controversial activist Michael Stürzenberger, the main speaker at the rally. Six people were injured, including Stürzenberger and a police officer who was stabbed in the neck and died from his injuries two days later. The attack was stopped when the suspect was shot and injured by another police officer. Investigators suspect that the suspect's motive was Islamist in nature.
On the evening of 23 August 2024, a mass stabbing took place during a festival celebrating the 650th anniversary of Solingen, Germany, when a Syrian man armed with a knife killed three people and injured eight others. The public prosecutor accused the suspect of being motivated by "radical Islamist convictions". The attacker is also suspected of being a member of Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attack.
