The US Department of State reported 273 international terrorist attacks in 1998.3
Transportation and transportation infrastructure were the target of 116 of these attacks.
This was a slight decrease from 1997, but only about two-thirds of 1995's high. Nearly 70 percent of these attacks were terrorist attacks against US owned pipelines, primarily in Colombia. Additionally highways, buses, and civil aviation each accounted for about 8 percent of the incidents. There were no American casualties reported in any of these incidents. Several Americans were reported kidnapped at highway roadblocks in Colombia and during oil platform takeovers in Nigeria.
Civil aviation remains the most visible national symbol of transportation, but it has experienced a decline in incidents each of the last three years. Annually, over 20 million Americans fly abroad. Another growing concern for the Department is vast number of Americans traveling abroad-some to "exotic" out-of-the-way places - on cruises. The cruise line industry reports that between 6 million and 8 million Americans took cruises in 1998 to over 200 ports around the world. Perhaps even more significantly, industry sources report that Americans represent more than 80 percent of all passengers on all cruises worldwide. This provides terrorists a large number of vulnerable targets from which to choose. For a breakdown of international terrorist attacks by transportation mode, see Appendix A, Chart 2.
3 Patterns of Global Terrorism-1998, United States Department of State, Office of the Secretary of State, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, April 1998.
