OCTOBER 22 — On October 21, 2026, at 7.49 am, a 16-year-old student in Kuching, Sarawak, struck his teacher in a classroom with an edged weapon scrawled with a statement in white, while livestreaming the attack on Facebook.
Three months before, on July 6, 2026, a 15-year-old female student walked into her school in Banting, Selangor, and stabbed a schoolmate with a blade.
Before the attack, she flashed an OK sign in a TikTok video she uploaded.
Only a year ago, on October 14, 2025, a 14-year-old teenage boy carried concealed knives to his school in Petaling Jaya, where he fatally stabbed a 16-year-old to death. He was acquitted on the grounds that he was of unsound mind.
But these grisly school incidents are not limited to Malaysia. On November 7, 2025, a 17-year-old teenager put on a set of tactical gear and set off homemade explosives at his school in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Months later, on February 6, 2026, a teenager threw Molotov cocktails with scrawled messages at his school in West Kalimantan, Indonesia.
On August 7, 2026, a 14-year-old opened fire at his school in Bang Kruai, Nonthaburi, Thailand, killing nine. Earlier, before the attack, he had murdered both his grandparents.
Prior to that, on October 3, 2023, a 14-year-old teenager opened fire at Siam Paragon mall, killing three.
The Philippines also experienced three fatal school shootings in the second quarter of this year alone.
In Singapore, three teenagers were identified and detained by the Internal Security Department for plotting mass-casualty events.
On the surface, these youths had no prior connections because of geographical distance and separate social circles.
They were unlikely to have met, much less rubbed shoulders, though some may have known of one another through earlier attacks that circulated within the subculture as reference points or sources of inspiration.
Even so, apart from their age, what most of them had one thing in common was their claims that they were victims of bullying, all the while nursing personal vendettas or suffering mental health crises.
These attackers had previously come into contact with something sinister online that has afflicted many other countries and has been attributed with instigating mass-casualty attacks.
Each has either followed, immersed themselves in, or participated in the online subculture that valorises and adulates mass shooters known as the True Crime Community (TCC), which is also responsible for dissecting and disseminating violent content to study and learn from.
They are well-versed in the community’s coded language and dog whistles.
Meanwhile, public discussion has tended to fixate on single platforms, Roblox chief among them, and whether children should be banned from them.
But the problem is that the subculture’s tentacles reaches well beyond any one platform, operating in niche pockets of the surface web rather than the dark web.
Misanthropic and/or nihilistic violent extremism (M/NVE) refers to violence driven not by conventional political or religious beliefs, but by pronounced hostility towards people and society, which promotes a range of direct, transgressive and harmful actions to gain status and belonging, and the TCC is considered a key pipeline to it.
Some write off the phenomenon as “salad bar extremism” because it appears incoherent or ideologically unmoored.
However, the trouble with such buzzword-laden categorisation is its tendency to conflate a diffuse set of references with a lack of underlying intent.
Perpetrators select their targets, timing, locations, and notable dates based on motivations intelligible only within their particular frameworks.
They broadcast their intentions through livestreams, inscriptions on weapons, manifestos, and orchestrated symbols. These acts are designed to attract and manipulate spectatorship.
Debates about M/NVE often narrow to whether these acts are ordinary crimes or terrorism.
The framing is reductive because the binary disregards how violent behaviour is changing under harmful online environments, and it overlooks that terrorism is already treated as a crime.
The real question is whether the conduct meets the threshold for a terrorism response, particularly where public safety is at stake.
Answering it means treating terrorism as a tactic, not an ideology, a distinction policy discourse still tends to blur. The test is the political objective behind the act.
Recent developments in the United Kingdom have introduced additional complexity. In September 2026, a teenager from Nottingham was charged with preparing a terrorist attack in what is reported to be the first British case to cite misanthropy, defined as “hatred for humanity”, as the ideological motive.
This uncommon case signals a shift in the interpretation of “ideological motivation” within terrorism legislation, suggesting that legal responses are now encompassing atypical forms of violent extremism.
Consequently, dismissing M/NVE as “salad bar extremism”, a supposedly incoherent mix of grievances without ideology, is increasingly difficult to sustain and, at worst, reflects a failure to engage with the evidence.
In other words, extremism is not confined to religious motivation, which raises the further question of what counts as political.
Recent events in Poland illustrate how rapidly things can develop. In October 2026, three violent attacks occurred within a single week, all targetting schools and educational institutions in the central Mazovia region.
On October 7 in Ostrołęka, a 19-year-old assaulted individuals at a vocational school with a sharp object, resulting in several injuries, and a homemade device was later found at the school.
The following day in Leszczydół-Nowiny, a 15-year-old former student, equipped with a helmet-mounted camera, entered a primary school, killed the caretaker, and injured two staff members before being apprehended.
On October 10 in Warsaw, a 21-year-old female student attacked three individuals, two aged 17 and one aged 24, with a dangerous object.
In response to these attacks, as well as numerous thwarted plots and threats involving youths, authorities stepped up security across the country.
Polish Education Minister Barbara Nowacka reported that 59 schools, mostly in Mazovia, suspended classes.
Subsequently, a nationwide operation was conducted in which police inspected roughly 80,000 educational institutions and detained 135 people over online threats, weapons possession, and other suspected offences.
Addressing public concerns about potential copycat incidents or coordinated online challenges, including rumours of a “Bloody Friday,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk stated authorities found no evidence linking the attacks to organised networks or collective planning.
On October 12, 2026, in Aubagne near Marseille, France, a 14-year-old boy opened fire with a hunting rifle at Joseph Lakanal middle school, injuring both the headteacher and a teacher.
Investigators linked the perpetrator to the TCC. French counter-terrorism prosecutors brought terrorism-related charges against the youth over his links to the TCC, the first time in France that a direct link is being drawn between the movement and an attack.
The defendant claimed the attack was retaliation for perceived bullying, although investigators are still examining these claims.
The invocation of bullying as a justification for attacks associated with the TCC has become increasingly prevalent, and the South-east Asian cases underscore the need to evaluate such claims critically.
In Banting, Jakarta and Kuching, allegations of bullying have surfaced but remain unverified. Most likely, these claims aim to elicit public sympathy or mitigate personal culpability.
Collectively, these recent cases from France, Poland, and the United Kingdom indicate an emerging worldwide trend toward the use of terrorist tactics in school attacks.
This development warrants thoughtful examination. Rather than debating whether M/NVE constitutes terrorism, this opinion piece aims to illustrate why these actions fulfil the essential criteria.
The perpetrators’ animosity towards humanity reflects a distinct political stance, and the consequences of these attacks raise significant public-safety concerns.
Schools have become a target of choice because they are accessible, and their students and staff are largely vulnerable.
All of this brings the argument back to where it began. The persistent debate over whether these acts are crimes or terrorism should prompt us to step back and ask whether we are asking the right questions about M/NVE, if at all.
That these acts qualify as terrorism does not, however, settle whether terrorism legislation should be written or extended to cover them, which is a different question and calls for separate consideration.
* Munira Mustaffa is the founder and Executive Director of Chasseur Group, a boutique security research and analytical consulting firm based in Kuala Lumpur, where she serves as principal consultant specialising in emerging security threats, and conducts threat assessment and attack attribution. She is a Senior Fellow at Verve Research and a 2023 Visiting Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) in The Hague.
** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
