New York City and terrorism are in the news again due to the arrest of Pakistani Faisal Shahzad, living in Shelton, Connecticut, who was arrested at John F. Kennedy Airport after tryingto flee to Dubai.
Why do terrorists seem to hate New York? In America, it is the most likely city to be sympathetic to Muslim states that promote terrorism, so it would seem counterintuitive to bomb it.
New York is home to many diverse groups and its receptiveness to outsiders may be part of the reason. Puerto Rican separatists in the 1970s, for example, were more difficult to find just as Muslim terrorists are hard to distinguish from law-abiding people from the Mid-East now. In rural America there are also fewer targets that will get worldwide media attention.
Terrorist attacks in the United States over the past four decades have also primarily involved bombs or explosives, says a new report from the University of Maryland-based National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).
"Explosives are by far the weapon of choice for terrorists in New York City," says Gary LaFree, who directs START and the GTD. "Of all terror attacks in New York City from 1970 to 2007, 70 percent involved bombs or explosives."
La Free adds that "Car bombs have played a small but deadly role in U.S. terrorism." Of the ten terrorist car bomb attacks in the U.S., six have taken place in New York City. The most costly in the city involved the 1993 truck bomb terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, which killed six and injured a thousand people.
"Car bombs have played a small but deadly role in US terrorism," says Maryland researcher Gary LaFree, based on figures in the Global Terrorism Database.
(Photo Credit: University of Maryland START Center)
Among the other trends noted in the report covering the period 1970 to 2007:
- New York City is, by far, the most frequent site of terrorism in the United States;
- New York City has suffered more terrorist attacks than the next four most frequently target cities combined (Miami, 70; San Francisco, 66; Washington, D.C., 59; Los Angeles, 54);
- 284 terror attacks occurred in New York's five boroughs between 1970 and 2007;
- Nearly three-fourths of these terrorist attacks took place in the 1970s, followed by less frequent, but often more deadly incidents including the 1993 and September 11th 2001 World Trade Center bombings;
- Businesses and government facilities are the most frequent targets throughout the United States.
"While al-Qaeda has launched the deadliest attacks on New York City targets, almost 40 other identified groups engaged in terrorism in this city from 1970 to 2007, representing a range of different ideologies, backgrounds and goals, with changing actors over time," the report says.
The research is based on data from the Center's Global Terrorism Database (GTD), the world's most comprehensive, unclassified collection of terror incidents. http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/
Part of the difficulty may also be a cultural one; Shahzad should have been on a terrorist watch list due to attending terrorism boot camps in Pakistan but he had become a naturalized US citizen a few months ago and had passed the security screening at the time so there are concerns about 'profiling.'