On this day in 2014, one person was killed and seven wounded when a bomb was tossed a them outside a mosque in Tanzania’s Zanzibar region in what looked like a terrorist attack.
Is it possible to call something an act of terrorism if we have no idea who is behind it?
ZANZIBAR, TANZANIA — Sometimes I fear I must come across as a broken record (NB for anyone born after, say 1985, records were vinyl platters on which music was recorded and which had a nasty habit of getting scratched and hence repeating the same lyric over and over and over and…). I keep reminding my readers that terrorism is a crime for which there is an underlying motivation: political, religious or ideological.
There is also a challenge in proving that the crime was indeed perpetrated for one, or several, of these reasons. After all, not every murder is terrorism, only those carried out by individuals or groups seeking to advance a cause along the above-noted lines.
Bombing at tanzanian mosque
So what happens when an attack sure looks like a terrorist one but authorities fail to identify who executed it and why? What do we do then?
On this day in 2014 a bomb killed one person and wounded at least seven in front of a mosque near the capital of Tanzania’s Zanzibar region, Stone Town. The region had been hit by a series of bomb attacks that year and in 2013, targeting mosques, churches and restaurants.
Unknown assailants threw a hand-made explosive device from a passing car as worshipers emerged from a mosque in the Darajani area on Friday night. No suspects have been arrested so far. An investigation is underway to determine who carried out the latest attack and what their motives were.
Zanzibar police spokesman Mohammed Mhina
Furthermore, some Muslims living along Tanzania’s coast feel marginalised by the secular government, providing fertile recruitment grounds for Islamist groups such as Somalia’s Al Shabaab.
A bomb tossed near a mosque sure sounds to me like a terrorist attack, wouldn’t you agree? And yet with no actor and no motive it is impossible to tell. Such is the challenge facing law enforcement and public prosecutors sometimes.
