Timeline: US attack plots

List of attacks on the US targets at home and abroad in the last 30 years.

Times Square bomb scare
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New York investigators study evidence after a car bomb attack was foiled in Times Square [AFP]

US targets have come under attack both at home and abroad in the last 30 years:

October 2010 – Authorities on three continents investigate whether suspicious packages shipped from Yemen to religious sites in the US were part of a “terrorist plot” after cargo planes are grounded in UK, US and Dubai.

April 2010 – Police, tipped off by a street vendor, find and defuse a bomb inside a vehiclein New York’s Times Square.

December 2009 – A Nigerian man is seized after trying to blow up US-bound Northwest Flight 253as it approaches Detroit.

His attempt was thwarted by passengers and crew on the plane who extinguished the flames and restrained him.

December 2004 – Fighters storm the US consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, killing five local staff and four Saudi security personnel. Three fighters are killed and two captured.

May 2003 – Suicide bombers in vehicles shoot their way into housing compounds for expatriates in Riyadh, the the Saudi capital, as residents sleep. The death toll of 35 includes nine Americans.

September 2001 – Three planes hijacked by al-Qaeda fighters crash into New York’s World Trade Centre towers and the Pentagonnear Washington. A fourth hijacked plane crashes in Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people are killed in total.

October 2000 – Suicide bombers ram an explosives-laden rubber raft into the US destroyer Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen,killing 17 US sailors.

August 1998 – Lorry bombs explode at US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans, and wounding thousands.

All but 10 of the deaths are in Nairobi, where the damage is worst.

July 1996 – A bomb explodes at a concert during the Atlanta Olympic Games, killing two people and wounding 110.

June 1996 – A fuel truck bomb kills 19 American soldiers and wounds nearly 400 people at a US military complex in Khobar near the Saudi Arabian oil city of Dhahran.

November 1995 – In Saudi Arabia, a bomb attack on a US-run military centre in Riyadh kills seven people, five of them Americans.

April 1995 – A truck bomb destroys the US federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people.

Two Americans are convicted and one of them is executed.

February 1993 – Six people are killed and more than 1,000 wounded when a bomb in a van explodes under the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York.

December 1988 – A Pan American World Airways Boeing 747 crashes on the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 259 people aboardwhen a bomb on board explodes. Eleven people on the ground are also killed.

December 1985 – A hit-squad attacks US and Israeli check-in desks at international airports in Rome and Vienna simultaneously. The attacks claim a total of 20 lives, including four of the fighters.

October 1983 – A suicide car bomb attack by a Muslim group on the headquarters of the US military’s peacekeeping force in Lebanon kills 241 US servicemen.

April 1983 – The US embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, is destroyed in a suicide car bomb attack. Sixty-three people are killed, among them 17 Americans, including Robert Ames, the CIA’s chief Middle East analyst.

November 1979 – Iranian group seizes the US embassy in Tehran, taking 90 hostages. Fifty-two people are held captive for 444 days.

The hostages are released on January 20, 1981, the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as president.

Source: Al Jazeera, News Agencies