Terror Acts Down in ‘96, but Deaths Up

WASHINGTON — Although international terrorists committed the fewest acts of violence in 25 years in 1996, the death toll from their attacks was one of the highest ever, the State Department said Wednesday.

In its annual report on worldwide terrorism, the Clinton administration continued to list seven countries as perpetrators of state-sponsored terrorism: Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Cuba and Syria. Iran was singled out as the worst offender.

Cuba and North Korea were included even though the State Department acknowledged that “Cuba no longer actively supports armed struggle in Latin America and other parts of the world,” and “North Korea cannot be conclusively linked to any international terrorist attacks since 1987.” Both countries, however, harbor international terrorists, the department said.

Ambassador Philip C. Wilcox Jr., the department’s coordinator for counter-terrorism and the report’s chief author, told reporters there were 296 acts of international terrorism in 1996, the lowest annual total in 25 years and a one-third drop from the 440 incidents recorded in 1995.

But the casualty list of 311 killed and 2,652 wounded was “one of the highest ever recorded,” he said. The number of dead, in fact, nearly doubled from the 1995 toll of 163.

The 1996 death total was swelled by the State Department’s decision to include the deadliest terror attack of the year in its statistics: the smashing of an explosives-laden truck by Tamil separatists into the Sri Lanka Central Bank offices in downtown Colombo on Jan. 31, 1996. Ninety people were killed and 1,400 were wounded in the attack.

The State Department usually does not count as terrorist acts attacks by one ethnic group against another in the same country. But since nine foreigners, including two Americans, died in the Tamil attack, it was included in the annual report.

Wilcox said that “terrorism is also a more lethal threat than it has ever been in the past because of growing access of terrorists to technology.”

As an example of the lethal nature of modern weapons, Wilcox cited the explosion of a large fuel truck outside the U.S. military’s Khobar Towers housing complex near Dhahran in Saudi Arabia in June. Nineteen American military personnel were killed and 500 people wounded.

Wilcox took some solace in the diminished number of terrorist incidents in 1996, which he attributed in part to “tougher policies by the U.S. government and by our friends.”

“There is a growing consensus around the world that terrorism is a pure crime, that it cannot be condoned nor excused for political purposes,” he said.

As an example of tougher American policies, he cited an anti-terrorist law signed by President Clinton last year that expands the authority of U.S. courts to prosecute terrorists for crimes against Americans committed outside the United States.

The State Department’s list of governments involved in state-sponsored terrorism has remained the same for six years.