FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - A new study at the university’s Terrorism Research Center in Fulbright College will cull data from the court records of more than 500 known terrorists to track the criminal, geographic and temporal patterns that precede terrorist attacks. Understanding how such attacks develop and progress could lead to prediction and prevention measures that save lives.

The research is sponsored by a $343,885 grant from the National Institute of Justice. Brent Smith, professor of sociology and director of the center, will use the grant to fund his latest project, "Pre-incident Indicators of Terrorist Incidents: The Identification of Behavioral, Geographic and Temporal Patterns of Preparatory Conduct."

Very little empirical data exists on the planning and preparation of terrorist attacks, Smith said. In attempting to predict attacks, federal agents and police officers largely rely on anecdotal information about early indicators of terrorist activity. Smith’s research will use in-depth analyses of known terrorist plots to provide quantitative data on how terrorists plan and prepare their attacks.

"Terrorists commit hundreds of preparatory and ancillary crimes that are not terrorist attacks but which might give us some indication of the routinized patterns of preparatory conduct," Smith said. "Our goal is to map those preparatory crimes by time and location to determine if patterns of conduct exist."

In pursuing the project, Smith will collaborate with Robert Heibel, former deputy director of the FBI Counter-Terrorism Division. Heibel now directs the Research/Intelligence Analyst program at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Penn.

Using court documents and FBI indictment records for reference, Smith will select 75 incidents of terrorist activity to serve as case studies from which he and Heibel will extract quantitative data. They’ll note the number and types of preparatory crimes committed. In addition, they will record demographic information about the terrorist group, including the number of participants. They’ll create a timeline of events leading to the attack. And they will geographically pinpoint all stages of activity - where the terrorists lived, where they planned, and the relation of those places to the intended and actual targets.

"We need to know details. Do terrorists tend to live near their targets or do they move around? Are there separate locations for living and planning? Was there a flurry of activity followed by a lull before the incident, or was there a steady escalation in preparation?" Smith explained. "No one knows what sort of patterns exist in how terrorists think, plan and act."

To acquire all the information they need, Smith and Heibel will supplement the FBI and court documents with a variety of other sources, including books, memoirs and personal records written by and about known terrorists, copies of terrorism manuals from groups worldwide and the expertise of numerous consultants. After compiling and analyzing the information, Smith will use the data to create GIS maps that reveal spatial patterns and visually plot the progress of terrorist activity.

Many of the case studies used in this project will be culled from the American Terrorism Study - a database that Smith created while a professor at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Funded by the Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, this database contains information on more than 3,000 criminal charges against nearly 500 terrorists representing 60 different terrorist organizations. It spans more than 20 years of FBI investigations from 1980-2002.

The database will serve as a resource for identifying case studies in Smith’s current project. In addition, he has hired experts in environmental extremism, right wing and left wing terrorism, international terrorism and Puerto Rican terrorism to advise on the project and to suggest terrorist incidents that may not be included in the database but deserve greater study.

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is the research, development and evaluation agency of the U.S. Department of Justice. It identifies counter-terrorism as a high priority goal over the next 3-5 years, and it allots funding in this area to "develop knowledge and tools that help prevent, deter or apprehend terrorists, including improving intelligence gathering, information sharing, risk assessment, target hardening, surveillance and detection." For more information on the NIJ, visit its Web site at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/.

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