The case of 24-year-old Anis A. who killed 12 and injured more than 50 people during a terror attack is analyzed from a threat assessment perspective. On December, 19th, 2016, the perpetrator drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of investigation reports and open source media data. It traces the perpetrator's psychological and social history of radicalization, as well as the role of five proximal warning behaviors that occurred before and correlated with the attack: leakage, fixation, identification, last resort, and pathway. Data show that security authorities had an enormous amount of information on the perpetrator before the attack. Eventually security agencies presumed that no acute threat from Anis A. existed a month before the attack. It will become increasingly important in the future that officials fall back on evidence-based and validated evaluation criteria. It is for this reason that both the development and implementation of structured risk and threat assessment instruments, as well as the scientific debate about them, are highly desirable.
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