Terror in Europe the Last 45 Years

For John, BLUF:  And there was also the Provos, whose events reached as far as Germany.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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From a friend down at the Naval War College, Newport, RI, I got a link to the DataGraver website, where we can see European deaths due to terrorism from 1970 to 2015.  Here is the link—"PEOPLE KILLED BY TERRORISM PER YEAR IN WESTERN EUROPE 1970-2015".

Besides a chart with overall numbers there is one that breaks out the number of terrorist events noted as "Islam Inspired".

The first thing to note is that terrorist events have been a way of life in Western Europe and the numbers have been down as we have moved into the 21st Century, until recently.

The other thing is that there are some events not listed as we might.  An example is the 1988 Pan Am flight 103 blown up over Lockerbie, where 270 people died.  While the event was traced to Libya, it is not listed as "Islam Inspired" and one can see why.  Also, the Air India flight 182 that crashed after a bomb exploded in Irish air space in 1985 is not included in the Western Europa data by GTD.  In that crash 329 people died.

Some of the terrorism in the 1970s shown on the chart was from the German Baader Meinhof Gang (also known as The Red Army Faction) and some was from the Italian Brigate Rosse.♠  As an anecdote, one of those deaths due to the Red Brigades was that of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped and his body dumped 55 days later.  The location was about a mile or so north of where we had been living for three and a half years.  He was found near the "Marble Factory".  We had left several weeks before the body was found.  Terrorism can pass quite close by you and you might not realize it, until something ugly happens.

UPDATE:  Corrected a typo, changing "Factor" to "Factory".

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  One of their actions was to kidnap US Army Brigadier General James Dozier.  Their original target, a NATO FIFTH ATAF American General wasn't home when the team came calling.