A Muslim of Moroccan origin who mowed down seven pedestrians with his car in the northern Italian city of Modena on May 16, sent a series of anti-Christian hate emails in late April to the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia after he was denied his preferred job.
Salim El Koudri, a 31-year-old graduate in business economics, fled the scene and stabbed a bystander who attempted to stop him after he drove a Citroën C3 at more than 100 km/h, hitting a cyclist before driving onto the sidewalk and ramming a group of pedestrians.
You f*****g Christian bastards and your Jesus Christ on the cross, I’ll burn him.
Five women and three men were injured, including a woman who lost both her legs, when the car that El Koudri was driving struck them in downtown Modena. Four victims are in serious condition.
Luca Signorelli, a bystander, restrained El Koudri after he tried to escape. The perpetrator threw Signorelli to the ground, pulled out a knife, and tried to stab his head and heart. However, other locals overpowered the assailant and handed him over to the police.
Debate Over Assailant’s Mental Health
Left-wing politicians and media immediately dismissed an Islamist angle to the attack, insisting that El Koudri had suffered from schizoid mental disorders since 2022. But at a press conference later that evening, the Prefect of Modena, Fabrizia Triolo, confirmed that the perpetrator was not under the influence of psychotropic substances.
In a post on X, Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said that El Koudri had expressed resentment and dissatisfaction with his work and social status in a series of hate emails sent to his university, where he had applied for a job.
“At this stage, he has shown no signs of structured Islamist radicalization, and he does not appear to belong to networks of fundamentalist propaganda,” Piantedosi wrote. “But we will have the exact framing when the investigators complete their work, and in any case, all this cannot lead to dismissing the attack as the act of an isolated madman.”
Investigator Probe Anti-Christian Hate Mail
Investigators are examining four emails El Koudri sent to the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia on April 27, 2021, between 7:28 p.m. and 8:38 p.m. “You need to give me work as an employee, not a warehouse worker, you understand, and here in Modena, not in the middle of nowhere where you’re left with 500 euros a month if you’re lucky,” he wrote.
A few minutes later, El Koudri writes: “You f*****g Christian bastards and your Jesus Christ on the cross, I’ll burn him.” He apologized in his final email: “Sorry for the rudeness.”
El Koudri is also reported to have insulted Christianity on social media. “He writes ‘Christian bastards’ and praises Allah in Arabic on accounts closed by Facebook,” Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini told the media. The assailant’s social media accounts were swiftly shut down.
“There was too much haste in immediately dismissing the terrorist hypothesis, less than 36 hours after the incident and attributing the attack to mental illness. I wasn’t aware that patients with schizoid disorders have a history of ISIS-style attacks,” Giovanni Giacalone, an Italian expert in terrorism and counterterrorism at the David Institute for Security Policy, told Focus on Western Islamism (FWI).
“It should also be noted that May 16, the day of the attack, marked the 78th anniversary of the so-called ‘Nakba,’ and demonstrations led by Islamist, Palestinian, and far-left groups against Israel, the U.S., and their allies were underway in several Italian cities,” he stressed.
“Modena’s Synagogue is just a few minutes away from the site of the attack,” and the anti-Christian emails containing “blasphemous expressions” are “a very important element,” Giacalone added.
It’s not a new issue. In an 2006 essay published in 2006, Daniel Pipes, founder of the Middle East Forum, argued that some Muslims who appear well integrated into Western society can abruptly carry out acts of jihadist violence without prior signs of overt radicalization.
Pipes coined the term “Sudden Jihad Syndrome” to describe cases in which seemingly well-integrated Muslims abruptly commit acts of jihadist violence, warning that such attacks leave the public wondering “how can one be confident a law-abiding Muslim will not suddenly erupt in a homicidal rage?”
Experts Draw Attention to ‘Vehicular Jihad’
“The attacker’s modus operandi is the classic Islamic State ‘lone wolf’ approach, already used in numerous attacks in Europe and the United States by ISIS supporters: The perpetrator first uses the vehicle as a weapon against bystanders before attacking them with a knife while fleeing,” Giacalone, a senior adviser for the “Monitoring Jihadism Italy Project,” told FWI.
In a March 2025 article, researchers from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point found that, of the 18 vehicular-ramming attacks between 2014 and March 2025, 15 (83 percent) were carried out by jihadis, and three (17 percent) by right-wing extremists.
Titled “Into the Crowd: The Evolution of Vehicular Attacks and Prevention Efforts,” the article noted that vehicle-ramming tactics “have more recently been a regular feature of Islamic State terrorism in the West.” A 2010 edition of the al-Qaida magazine Inspire promoted such tactics because of their efficiency, exhorting followers to “mow down the enemies of Allah.”
In September 2014, Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani called for supporters to use vehicles as weapons, saying that if they were “not able to find an IED or a bullet,” then they should “single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies, smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car,” the article reported.
“Vehicular attacks also have a particularly shocking component due to their speed and kinetic force and the fact that they occur in highly vulnerable pedestrian spaces. This facilitates an important aspect of terrorism: media coverage, especially if images or videos of the attack are posted online or broadcast,” the researchers observed.
While police have yet to reveal details of El Koudri’s car, the article explained that perpetrators obtained their vehicles through theft, from their workplace, by using their personal vehicles, or, in numerous cases, by renting vehicles at no significant cost.
Conservative politicians blasted the media and left-wing leaders for excusing the violence by portraying El Koudri as mentally unstable.
Condemning the “hypocritical double standards,” European Parliamen member Anna Cisint remarked that El Koudri’s “obscured profiles and the email to the University [reveal] all his visceral hatred toward the West and us Christians.”
“Let’s stop with the excuses. Here we’re not dealing with mere psychopathy but with a full-blown attack of Islamic origin,” Isabella Tovaglieri, a member of the European Parliament, tweeted, warning that the attack “marks an escalation of Islamic radicalism that must be stopped by any means necessary.”
