Five US urban counties lead terror hot spots list: Maryland Varsity research

Maryland (US) - Researchers at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) have warned that rural areas of America will continue to be the bases for launching of terror strikes due to the involvement of domestic actors.

In a report that they have prepared, they said that nearly a third of all terrorist attacks from 1970 to 2008 occurred in just five metropolitan U.S. counties, and that continue to occur in rural areas, spurred on by domestic actors.

Affiliated to the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Center of Excellence based at the University of Maryland, the START research was conducted at Maryland and at the University of Massachusetts-Boston.

They discovered that the largest number of events clustered around the major cities of Manhattan, New York (343 attacks); Los Angeles County(156 attacks); Miami-Dade County in Florida (103 attacks); San Francisco County in California (99 attacks)
Washington (79 attacks).

START researchers discovered that smaller, more rural counties such as Maricopa County, in Arizona.

The START researchers found that 65 of the nation's 3,143 counties were "hot spots" of terrorism.

They defined a "hot spot" as a county experiencing a greater than the average number of terrorist attacks, that is, more than six attacks across the entire time period (1970 to 2008).

"Mainly, terror attacks have been a problem in the bigger cities, but rural areas are not exempt," said Gary LaFree, director of START and lead author of the new report.