Timeline of terror attacks in Europe

* Nov 13, 2015: Gunmen stage multiple attacks in Paris, in spite of heightened security ahead of a UN climate changge conference, killing over 100 people.

* January 7, 2015: Gunmen attack French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, killing 12 people, mostly journalists. The attack was linked to cartoons allegedly derogatory of Islam.

* May 24, 2014 - Armed with a Kalashnikov, an intruder guns down four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. The suspect was a former French fighter linked to the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria.

* May 22, 2013: Two Al Qaeda-inspired extremists stab British soldier Lee Rigby to death in a London street.

* March, 2012: Three gun attacks target French soldiers and Jewish civilians in the cities of Montauban and Toulouse in France. Seven people are killed, and five others injured, four seriously.

* November 2, 2011: Offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris are firebombed after the magazine carried a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed on its cover. No one was injured.

* July 22, 2011: Anti-Muslim extremist Anders Behring Breivik plants a bomb in Oslo and then attacks a youth camp on Norway's Utoya island, killing 77 people - many of them teenagers.

* July 7, 2005: Fifty-two commuters are killed when four Al Qaeda-inspired suicide bombers blow themselves up on three London subway trains and a bus.

* September 1, 2004: Three-day school seige begins in Beslan in Russia that involved some 1,100 people being taken hostage and the death of 334 people.

* March 11, 2004 - Series of bomb blasts in Madrid's commuter trains kill 191 people and injured over 1,800. It was the worst terrorist attack in Europe since the Lockerbie bombing in 1988.

* November, 2003: At least 27 people are killed and more than 400 injured in bombings at the British consulate and the HSBC bank headquarters in Istanbul.

* October 23, 2002: Forty armed Chechens seize Moscow's crowded Dubrovka Theater, taking 850 hostages, 130 of whom died in the three-day seige. All the attackers were killed by the Spetsnaz Russian security forces.

* December 21, 1988: The Lockerbie bombing - a Pan-Am Boeing 747 is destroyed by a terrorist bomb, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew on board. Large sections of the aircraft crashed into residential areas of Lockerbie, killing 11 people on the ground.