Terrorists do not strike at random, and now a computer program can calculate the risk of an attack on behalf of the business sector with a particular vested interest in the issue: insurers.
"We don't agree with their ends, but they are not madmen. They have a logic, we can understand it," said Andrew Coburn, director of the terrorism department of Risk Management Solutions (RMS), a risk modeling agency specializing in disasters, after a meeting of major European insurers and reinsurers.
Coburn and his 40-member team at RMS map the logic of terrorist attacks, converting statistical, historical, military, geographical and industrial data and advice from defense experts into trends, graphs and ratios.
The result is a computer program, now in its fourth edition, that gives subscribers an estimate of the risk of having to provide insurance cover for a terrorist attack in 228 countries.
In the case of the cities most at risk of being targeted, it can give an estimate based on individual streets or buildings. Clients enter into the software the coordinates of the buildings they insure against terrorism.
"We run the analysis and tell them: if you have a bomb of, say, 2 tonnes in this location, the cost to you would be US$10 million," Coburn said.
"We use statistical patterns of risk. We look at the intentions of the terrorists: they tell us a lot about their intentions, we have to listen. They publish, they tell us their reasons" he added. "We know what they are trying to achieve."
The system aims to give insurers data for setting the prices they charge clients and also to alert them if they pass a certain threshold of risk of a terrorist incident in places particularly prone to attacks.
According to RMS, the six top European "hot spots", representing the risk of maximum pay-outs following a terrorist attack, are all in central London.
After these, the seventh highest on the list is the second arrondissement, or borough, of central Paris.
Worldwide, Manhattan ranks among the most high-risk places, containing five of the locations most prone to terrorists' attacks.
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