Why Terrorist Attacks Seem Predictable in Hindsight

How could our society have let this happen?

This question is posed in the opening paragraph of the official inquiry report following the terrorist attacks at Utøya and the government complex in Oslo on July 22, 2011. The phrasing has haunted professor in criminology Heidi Mork Lomell for nearly 15 years.

What lies beneath such a question?

- It implies that someone let it happen. Not just that the terrorist attack could have been prevented, but that someone failed to do what was necessary to avert it, she says.

According to Lomell's research, this premise is not unique to the 22 July Commission.

Reacted to the tone

Over the course of a little more than a decade, from 2011 to 2022, Norway was struck by three terrorist attacks. Following each attack, an inquiry committee was appointed to review the events and identify shortcomings and learning points (see fact box).

Lomell has analyzed the committees' approaches to whether the attacks could have been prevented or averted. She has also examined how the belief that terrorism can be prevented influences society's understanding of prevention.

The 22 July Commission's nearly 500-page official report became - unusually for a government report - a bestseller when it was published in 2012. The report received widespread praise and was regarded as an authoritative account, the "definitive answer" to what had happened, Lomell explains.

She herself reacted immediately to the tone of the rhetorical question in the introduction.

- I could not reconcile myself to the idea that this was a good way to frame an evaluation of a terrorist incident, she says.

Knowing the outcome

The commissions that investigated the terrorist attacks all had an advantage that the police and the Police Security Service (PST) lacked: they knew the time, the place, and the perpetrator.

After the attacks, they could search for the terrorists' names in various registers, trace the threads backward, and identify points where someone might potentially have acted differently and perhaps prevented the attack.

There were entries for all three terrorists: Breivik had ordered chemicals from Poland for NOK 121, Manshaus had been reported in a concern notification the previous year, and Matapour and Bhatti were also on the radar of PST and the Intelligence Service.

- In the aftermath of terrorist attacks, it is common, both in Norway and internationally, to find the perpetrators' names in one register or another, Lomell notes.

But what conclusions can be drawn from that?

The dangerous needle in a stack of needles

It is often a short step from such findings in registers to claims that the police or PST should have connected the dots and prevented the attack. Lomell warns against this form of hindsight bias.

By only studying the cases where things went wrong, and ignoring the thousands of tips that never materialised into terrorism, one gets a distorted picture of how difficult it is to distinguish between genuine and false threats, she points out.

- Searching for a known name after an event is fundamentally different from the task faced by the police and security authorities in their daily work, Lomell says.

The phrase "finding a needle in a haystack" is by no means accurate, the professor argues:

- We can all imagine how difficult it is to find a needle in a haystack. But a needle is still fundamentally different from dry grass.

It would be more accurate to say that the challenge is finding the dangerous needle in a stack of needles, she says, referring to researcher T.B. Munk, who coined the metaphor.

Radicalized by the police?

So-called "conversations of concern" (bekymringssamtaler) are one tool the police use to intervene with individuals who raise concerns. These conversations are held following tips from family members, friends, or members of the public.

However, this tool is not without controversy, Lomell emphasises. There is no guarantee that a person called in for such a conversation will be steered in a better direction. In some cases, it may actually intensify a process of radicalisation. This presents a real dilemma for the police and PST, and is discussed in the report following the 2019 Manshaus attack.

Despite a concern notification, no conversation was held with him:

- A conversation of concern can lead to someone changing their mind and receiving help. But it can also reinforce the person's belief that the authorities are undemocratic and out to get people like him, Lomell says.

Preventing what has already happened

Preventing crime requires knowledge of what is to be prevented. That is challenging enough with "ordinary" crime, which occurs relatively frequently. Terrorist attacks, by comparison, are extremely rare. How, then, can patterns be identified to determine what should be prevented, and where?

A common approach is to study completed attacks and learn from them. In this way, the new government complex has been transformed into what Lomell describes as an impregnable fortress for vehicles, with double barriers in all side streets. Never again will a car bomb be placed there, as happened on July 22, 2011.

Another example is the numerous concrete planters placed in pedestrian streets across Europe following repeated vehicle attacks against pedestrians.

- We try to prevent a repetition of terrorist acts that have already taken place. But one of the defining characteristics of terrorist acts is precisely that they rarely repeat themselves in the exact same way. Terrorists actively seek out new and unexpected methods and adapt to security measures, Lomell notes.

The rise of solo terrorists also creates difficulties for authorities. When terrorists operate alone, there is not necessarily any communication to monitor or be alerted to:

- The July 22 attack brought this into sharp focus, the professor says.

Too calm before the Pride attack?

The report following the Pride attack goes the furthest in criticizing the police and PST.

The committee concluded that it was "possible" that the attack could have been averted, among other things if an alert PST received from the Intelligence Service five days earlier had been handled differently. They were also criticized for failing to discover and connect a burning Pride flag on the Facebook page of Arfan Bhatti, who was later convicted of complicity in the attack. Bhatti has appealed his conviction, and the appeal is being heard in the court of appeal this autumn.

PST kept their head cooler than necessary, the committee concluded. This was attributed to a "culture of caution" (forsiktighetskultur) for which the 22 July Commission had also criticized PST.

- Matapour was definitely on the radar, and they had conducted conversations of concern. There were things that were not followed up. But to the extent that one expects someone to commit terror against Pride, most people would envision it happening during the parade itself, Lomell says.

Targeting the innocent

She is therefore reluctant to criticize the police outright for "keeping too cool a head":

- It is easy to say after a completed terrorist attack that authorities kept their heads too cool. But no one can, with surgical precision, identify only those who pose a real threat and predict exactly where and when they will carry out an attack, she says.

The alternative would mean surveillance and suspicion cast over a large number of innocent citizens, without necessarily reducing the risk of terrorism, the professor states.

This also aligns fully with the overarching goals of terrorists, she points out. The terrorists' "playbook" aims precisely to spread fear, mobilize frustration and anger against the authorities, and create divisions between different groups in society.

- Terrorism is prevented every single day

The professor's message is not that terrorism cannot be prevented.

- The Vision Zero, that authorities should and must be able to stop absolutely all terrorist acts, is unrealistic. But terrorism is prevented every single day, she emphasizes.

Here, PST and the police play an important role. However, the professor attributes the greatest significance to "our society" - which was effectively assigned the "blame" in the opening of the 22 July Commission report.

"Our society" prevents radicalization and terrorism through welfare services, schools, mental health care, the labor market, and local communities, Lomell highlights. These fundamental preventive mechanisms are the least invasive and most effective, but are often omitted from terrorism inquiries, partly because they are harder to measure.

The 22 July Commission opted out of an inquiry of these mechanisms due to time constraints, Lomell points out:

- The result was an exclusive focus on the proximate and immediate causes of the terrorist attack, such as security measures in the government complex, PST's work to detect preparations for terrorism, and society's control of weapons and explosives.

References

Lomell, H. M. (2026). 'How could our society have let this happen?' The idea of the preventability of terrorist attacks and its consequences. Nordic Journal of Criminology.