• What we know about Omar Mateen

    Omar Mateen, 29, was born in New York to Afghan parents. Since September 2007 he had worked as a security guard for G4 Security in Florida. The large security contractor provides security personnel to guard building, among them federal buildings. He underwent background checks in both 2007 and 2013. In March, British born Islamic preacher Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar gave a speech outside Orlando in which he called for the death of all homosexuals. “Death is the sentence. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about this. Death is the sentence,” he said.

  • AR-15: The most popular assault-style rifle in the United States

    The gunman who killed dozens of people in Aurora, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, and, yesterday, Orlando all used an AR-15 rifle. According to the National Rifle Association (NRA), the gun, which was designed by ArmaLite for the U.S. Army and originally produced by Colt in the 1960s, is the most popular rifle in the United States. Between 5 and 8.2 million assault-style rifles are privately owned by U.S. citizens, and 3.3 million of those were AR-15.

  • Major mass-shooting attacks in the U.S. since January 2009

    Between 2008 and 2013, the FBI used a narrow definition of mass shootings – limiting the designation “mass shootings” to incidents in which an individual “kills four or more people in a single incident… typically in a single location.” In 2013 the FBI changed its definition, moving away from “mass shootings” to identifying an “active shooter” as “an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area.” The FBI designated the incidents listed below as mass-shooting incidents.

  • Six things Americans should know about mass shootings

    The United States had 78 mass shootings during that 30-year period. The highest number of mass shootings experienced outside the United States was in Germany – where seven shootings occurred. In the other twenty-four industrialized countries taken together, 41 mass shootings took place. In other words, the United States had nearly double the number of mass shootings than all other twenty-four industrialized countries combined in the same 30-year period.

  • Terrorists gaining cyber capability to bring major cities to a standstill: U.K. intelligence chief

    Robert Hannigan, the director of GCHQ, the British equivalent of the U.S. NSA, has warned that terrorists and rogue states are gaining the technical capability to bring a major city to a standstill with the click of a button. He said that the risk to cities like London would significantly increase as more physical objects – cars, household appliances — are connected online in what is called the Internet of Things.

  • Euro 2016’s fan zones focus of security concerns

    Ten large fan zones in the center of ten French cities, set up to allow more fans to watch the Euro 2016 soccer games on giant outdoor screens, are the focus of security concerns. The tournament, which starts in France on Friday, is expected to draw more than ten million spectators from all over the world. “It as if we have created ten open-air Bataclans and invited the jihadists to do their worst,” one French security source said, referring to the Paris concert hall where ninety people were killed by jihadists on 13 November.

  • Turkey suspends sale of fertilizers containing nitrate in wake of car bombings

    In the wake of two car bombings which killed seventeen people, Turkey announced it was temporarily suspending the sale of fertilizers containing nitrate. The terrorists in the two bombings used fertilizers to make the explosives – as did Timothy McVeigh twenty years ago.

  • 4 killed, 6 injured in Tel Aviv terror attack (updated)

    Four people were killed and six injured yesterday in an attack by two armed terrorists near a shopping mall in the center of Tel Aviv. Of the six injured, one is in critical condition and four are in serious condition. The Sharona Mall is located within walking distance of the Kyria compound, the location of Israel’s Ministry of Defense and headquarters of the Israel Defense Force (IDF). The Israel government announced that 83,000 permits to West Bank residents to visit their relatives in Israel during the month of Ramadan have been suspended, and that permissions to residents of the Gaza Strip to pray in Al Aqsa have been revoked.

  • Infrared thermal imaging system spots menacing drones at a distance

    With the start of the UEFA Euro 2016 soccer tournament kicking off on10 June, expecting to draw a large international crowd at ten different stadiums in cities across France, security measures have been carefully considered by the organizers in light of a turbulent past couple of years in Europe and abroad. The growing popularity of the use of drones has necessitated consideration of counter-UAV technologies to thwart a terrorist attack using this method.

  • World violence reaches new all-time high

    The just-published 2016 Global Peace Index shows that the world would be growing more peaceful if it were not for the growing violence of Middle East conflicts. More than 100,000 people were killed in conflicts in 2014, up from almost 20,000 in 2008. Syria, with about 67,000 such deaths in 2014, accounted for most of that increase. The economic cost of violence in 2015 was $13.6 trillion, or 13.3 percent of global GDP — which is about 11 times the size of global foreign direct investment.

  • France unveils app to alert people to terror attacks

    Euro 2016 soccer tournament begins on Friday, and as part of the massive security operation undertaken to secure the ten millions spectators who will be watching the games from 10 June to 10 July, the French government has created a smartphone app designed to send warnings directly to people’s phones in the event of a bombing, shooting, or other disaster.

  • Revelations about U.K. special forces in Syria require debate on U.K. role: MPs

    British MPs say that the Ministry of Defense’s refusal to comment on ground operations by Special Forces in Syria means it is not possible to hold an informed debate about U.K. role in Syria. The Times reported that elite U.K. soldiers had crossed into southern Syria to support opposition forces fighting ISIS militants close to the border with Jordan.

  • Last surviving 9/11 search-and-rescue dog dies, receives hero's send-off

    The last surviving search and rescue dog who worked at Ground Zero following the 9/11 terrorist attacks died on Monday. Bretagne, a 16-year-old golden retriever, was put down at Fairfield Animal Hospital in Cypress, Texas. As Bretagne slowly walked into the hospital, she was saluted by representatives of state agencies who came to pay their respects.

  • Captured Hamas operative: Terror tunnel network extends across Gaza

    Hamas fighters can travel underground throughout the entirety of the Gaza Strip using the terror group’s tunnel network, according to a Hamas operative who was captured last month after he crossed illegally into Israel from Gaza. Palestinians in Gaza have recently expressed fears that Hamas tunnels built in or near civilian areas are putting non-combatants at risk of being hurt by Israeli strikes.

  • Revisiting the relationship between hate crime and terrorism

    New research from START examines the link between hate crime (bias-motivated crime) and terrorism at the county level, focusing on far-right extremism in the United States and pulling data from the U.S. Extremist Crime Database (ECDB) and the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). Among other things, the research has found that counties experiencing increases in one type of bias-motivated or extremist violence are likely to see significant increases in other types of extremist activity.