2016 Berlin truck attack
attack at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin on 19 December 2016
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 shot dead hours before the attack. The truck was eventually stopped by its automatic brakes. The perpetrator was 24-year-old 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.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant claimed responsibility for the attack and released a video of the perpetrator, Anis Amri, pledging allegiance to the terror group's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The attack is the deadliest act of terror in Germany since the 1980 Oktoberfest bombing in Munich, which killed 13 people and injured 211 others, and as of December 2023, it remains the worst Islamist terrorist attack by number of casualties in German history.
Background
The Berlin attack took place during a time of heightened Islamist terrorist activity in Europe.
The public source identifies “2016 Berlin truck attack” as attack at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin on 19 December 2016. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Berlin, truck and attack.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28036573. Authority coordinates are 52.505, 13.334. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2016, 1980 and 2023.
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This entry incorporates text from “2016 Berlin truck attack” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.