Top 10 Worst Terrorist Attacks

Ever since the dreadful incident of 9/11, the rate of terrorism has escalated manifold across the globe and nearly every other country seems to be the victim of this menace. Initially there were two big terrorist organizations namely: Al-Qaeda and Taliban but at present many more have emerged out of nowhere and established strongholds in many areas. Pakistan tribal areas are said to be the suspected strongholds of these terrorist organizations. Currently, USA is conducting a series of drone strikes in the tribal belt of Pakistan to destabilize the terrorist groups and a full scale operation is expected to take place in North Waziristan like South Waziristan. Recently, the top news is that the Al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden, has been by killed by USA Special Forces in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Let us run through some of the worst terrorist attacks in the world.

10. Ma’alot massacre

This incident took place on May 15, 1973 in Israel. It was a terrorist attack conducted by three armed Palestinian terrorists of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who entered Israel from Lebanon. They took more than 115 people as hostages for to two days and it all ended up in the deaths of over 25 hostages. They also killed a couple and their four-year-old son in an apartment in the town of Ma’a lot.

9. TWA flight 841

This terrorist incident took place on September 8, 1974, when after stopping for 68 minutes in Athens, TWA Flight 841 departed for Rome. TWA Flight 841 took off from Ben Gurion International Airport, Tel Aviv en route to JFK International Airport, New York City and it was scheduled to land in Athens, followed by Rome, and then proceed to New York. The plane crashed into the Lonian sea but it was suspected to be am engine failure which was caused due to a bomb blast in the cargo section of the plane. All 79 passengers and nine crew members were killed. A Palestinian youth organization took responsibility of the attack Abu Nidal and his terrorist organization was suspected to be involved in this plot.

8. Puerto Rican nationalist group FALN

On August 3, 1977 the FALN group entered Manhattan, USA and bombed the offices of Mobil Oil and a building containing US Defense Department security personnel. They killed one person and injured eight others in the Mobil offices. The magnitude of this terrorist attack can be well judged by the fact that the group warned that it had placed in 13 other buildings including the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center, which resulted in the evacuation of one hundred thousand people.

7. Border of Chechnya

On March 24, 2001, there were three car bomb attacks on Russian towns near the border of Chechnya resulting in the death of 20 people and almost 93 were injured.

6. Amerithrax

It started on September 18, 2001, one week after the September 11 attacks, but occurred over the course of several weeks. Five people were killed and almost seventeen other affected in this incident and it is considered to be one of the complex cases handled by FBI. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and two Democratic U.S. Senators.

5. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing

This incident occurred on February 26, 1993 and a very huge plan was behind this terrorist attack. The suspects planned to bring down the North and South tower of the World Trade Center. a truck bomb was detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The truck had a 1,336 lb (606 kg) urea nitrate–hydrogen gas enhanced device. They failed in their evil intentions but killed seven people and injured thousands. The attack was planned by a group including Ramzi Yousef, Mahmud Abouhalima, Mohammad Salameh, Nidal A. Ayyad, Abdul Rahman Yasin and Ahmad Ajaj and they were being funded by Khaled Shaikh Mohammed.

4. The Wall Street bombing

This deadly incident claimed 38 lives and the figure for those who were seriously injured in this terrorist attack swelled up to 143. This incident took place at 12:01 p.m. on September 16, 1920, in the Financial District of New York City. It is highly suspected that it was carried out by Galleanists (Italian anarchists) and it was actually a bomb concealed in a horse-drawn wagon.

3. The 2008 Mumbai attacks

It is also referred to as November 26 or 26/11 and this terrorist attack targeted India’s largest city Mumbai. It was actually a series of 10 coordinated shooting and bombing attacks across Mumbai by Islamic terrorists who are believed to have come from Pakistani Seawaters and backed by ISI, Pakistani secret service agency. It affected the Indo-Pak relation immensely and the bilateral relations were debilitated which have never returned to normalcy since.

2. The Oklahoma City bombing

This incident took place on April 19, 1995 and it was an attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. It was the most deadly terrorist attack on the American soil until 9/11,and it claimed 168 lives, including 19 children under the age of 6,[1] and injured more than 680 people.

1. 9/11 World Trade Center attack

These were a series of coordinated attacks by Al-Qaeda on America on September 11, 2001. Four commercial passenger jet airliners were hijacked by 19 Al-Qaeda members and they intentionally steered two of the planes towards the Twin Towers of World Trade Center, consequently bringing them down to earth. The third airliner was crashed into The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. and the fourth one crashed into a field near Shanksville in rural Pennsylvania. There were no survivors from any of the flights. This event triggered many changes in the world as a whole and was the beginning of a very horrendous film for the humans across the globe because humans had to pay a very heavy price of this terrorist attack and this fact is conspicuous from the current state of affairs.