Pakistan has suffered its sharpest rise in suicide attacks in one year: CTC report

London, Jan 28 (ANI): Pakistan has suffered the sharpest rise in suicide attacks from July 2007 to June 2008, according to a newly published report.

A significant shift in the incidence of suicide bombing has taken place away from Iraq and towards Pakistan and Afghanistan over the last three years.

Assaf Moghadan, an associate professor at the Combating Terrorism Centre (CTC), an independent research institute at the West Point military academy in the US, found that Pakistan suffered the sharpest rise in suicide attacks - 12.9 per cent of all attacks between July 2007 and June 2008, up from 3.14 per cent in the previous 12-month period.

Moghadan examined the 1,944 suicide attacks that took place between 1981 and June 2008 and found that between July 2007 and June 2008 58.2 per cent of attacks took place in Iraq and 36.6 per cent in Afghanistan and Pakistan, compared with 69.3 per cent in Iraq and 25.1 per cent in Afghanistan and Pakistan the year before.

Grim as they are, the statistics yield one significant positive finding - the prediction that 2008 should see a fall in the number of suicide attacks in the first time for a decade, the Dawn reported.

The report said for the first time in a decade the last 12 months saw a considerable decrease in the incidents of suicide attacks in most other parts of the world.

During the first half of last year, 198 suicide attacks took place, suggesting a total of less than 400 for 2008, Moghadan writes in the January issue of CTC Sentinel. This compares to 535 for 2007, the deadliest toll in the last nine years. (ANI)