Terrorism Timeine - from The Wall Street Journal - January, 2015

Twelve people were killed Wednesday and several others injured as masked gunmen stormed the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. French President François Hollande called the shootings a terrorist attack. Below, some attacks linked to Islamist groups or individuals over the past 20 years:

July 25, 1995, France: A bombing at the Saint-Michel subway station in Paris kills eight and injures more than 150 people. The attack is masterminded by Rachid Ramda, an Algerian with links to the Armed Islamic Group, a fundamentalist revolutionary group committed to overthrowing the Algerian government.

Sept. 11, 2001, U.S.: The September 11 terrorist attacks kill nearly 3,000 people. Terrorists crash passenger jets into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Virginia, and a fourth airplane crashes in a western Pennsylvania field.

March 11, 2004, Spain: A series of bomb blasts tears through four Spanish commuter trains in Madrid, killing more than 190 people, in the deadliest terror attack in Europe since Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. An Islamist group said to have been inspired by al Qaeda is blamed for the attack.

Nov. 2, 2004, The Netherlands: Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh is shot, stabbed and slashed across the throat by Dutch-Moroccan Muslim Mohammed Bouyeri, who is outraged by his victim’s criticism of Islam. (Mr. van Gogh’s short film “Submission: Part I” contained images of women’s bodies that had been imprinted with passages from the Quran.) A violent backlash ensues days after the killing, leading to a 15-hour standoff between police and members of a suspected terror cell in The Hague.

July 7, 2005, U.K.: Four coordinated attacks by suicide bombers rip through London subway trains and a bus, killing 52 rush-hour commuters. The killers are later identified as British al Qaeda sympathizers Shehzad Tanweer, Hasib Hussain, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Jermaine Lindsay.

2005-2010, Denmark: The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten printed cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in the autumn of 2005, sparking a jihadist campaign against Denmark. Jyllands-Posten, along with other Danish newspapers, reprinted the cartoons in 2008 as a message in support of freedom of speech. The drawings, including one by cartoonist Kurt Westergaard that featured Muhammad with a turban in the shape of a bomb, provoked outrage and protests across the Muslim world. After their publication, a plot to murder Mr. Westergaard emerged, and a suicide bombing rocked the Danish Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. In late 2010, Danish and Swedish authorities said they foiled a terrorist attack modeled on the Mumbai raid that had targeted the Copenhagen offices of Jyllands-Posten.

 

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Nov. 2, 2011, France: A fire started by a Molotov cocktail guts the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, hours before a special issue of the weekly that featured a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad appears on newsstands. No one is injured in the blaze.

March 2012, France: Mohamed Merah, a French petty criminal swearing fealty to al Qaeda, kills three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi and three French soldiers in a series of point-blank shootings in and around the southern town of Toulouse.

May 22, 2013, U.K.: British-born Muslim converts Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale drive into British soldier Lee Rigby outside a London army barracks, then stab him and tried to hack his head off with a meat cleaver. The two are filmed by passersby as they declare their actions to be in retribution for British military actions abroad.

May 24, 2014, Belgium: A gunman murders four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels. Mehdi Nemmouche, a French national with ties to Islamic State, is arrested and charged with the killings.

Oct. 22, 2014, Canada: Troopers stationed near Canada’s Parliament come under fire from Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, an ex-convict who weeks earlier had been thwarted in his attempts to fly to Syria and join Islamic State. After wounding an army reservist who later died in the hospital, Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau is shot by police and is pronounced dead at the scene. The assault is the first on Canada’s Parliament since Joseph Chartier’s 1966 bomb attack.

Dec. 15, 2014, Australia: A 16-hour siege of a Sydney cafe ends with three people dead, including lone gunman Man Haron Monis, an Iranian immigrant who claims to be a recent adherent to the cause of Islamic State. After fruitless negotiations, police storm the scene. In the ensuing raid, Mr. Monis and two hostages—a 34-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman—are killed.

Corrections & Amplifications

The 2004 attacks on Spanish commuter trains in Madrid occurred on March 11, 2004. An earlier version of this article incorrectly gave the date as March 12. (Jan. 7, 2015)