As many New Yorkers expressed relief at the relatively minor impact of the latest terror attack on their city, experts said that both suicide attacks and those that attempt to hide homemade bombs in public places are rarely successful, reports the Christian Science Monitor. Only three people sustained minor injuries from the crude, homemade pipe bomb assembled by Akayed Ullah, the Bangladeshi immigrant who lived in Brooklyn for seven years and carried out Monday’s failed attack. There never has been a successful suicide bombing on U.S. soil. Since 9/11, there has only been a single suicide attack in the U.S., a domestic act of terror that did not involve warped religious beliefs. In 2010, Andrew Joseph Stack III deliberately flew his single-engine plane into an Internal Revenue Service office in Austin, citing the “greed” and “insanity” of tax collectors. His suicide attack killed one IRS worker and injured 13.
The kind of bombs used by Ullah “aren’t really sophisticated, and they often fail,” says political scientist Don Haider-Markel of the University of Kansas, a terrorism expert. “And most of the failures you don’t even hear about, because they’re usually when somebody makes one and puts it into someone’s mailbox, or puts it in front of someone’s door – maybe it happens in Iowa somewhere, and it never makes national news.” In 2013, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev built two homemade bombs and planted them near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring hundreds. Most others were unsuccessful. Still, the attempted attack in New York comes as suicide attacks around the globe have reached record levels. The Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University in Israel found that 2016 was the deadliest year on record for suicide terror attacks worldwide. Nearly 500 attacks in 28 countries that killed about 5,650 people.