Terror is killing far fewer people in the UK now than it was in the 1980s.
Prime Minister Theresa May has chaired a meeting of the Government’s Cobra emergency committee in response to the attack, condemning the “terrible incident”.
But despite this latest attack, relatively few people have been killed by terrorist attacks in the UK in recent years.
Between 2000 and 2015, 90 people have been killed in the UK in terrorist attacks, according to figures from the Global Terrorism Database. Although not on British soil, a further 30 British people were killed in Tunisia when a gunman attacked a hotel popular among Western tourists.
This compares to 1,094 deaths in the 15-year period before that, between 1985 and 1999, and a further 2,211 between 1970 and 1984.
The worst year for terrorism-related deaths in the UK was 1988, when 372 people died. The majority of these died in the Lockerbie disaster, when 270 were killed as a Pan Am transatlantic flight was destroyed by a bomb.
Since 1970, Northern Ireland has seen the most terrorism-related deaths out of any nation in the UK, with IRA-related terrorism plaguing the nation for decades.
1972 saw the peak of this violence, with 353 people killed in Northern Ireland – out of a total of 368 in the whole of the UK.
How does the UK’s terror threat compare with the rest of Europe?
Since 1970, the UK has faced the most deaths as a result of terrorism in Western Europe – totalling 3,395.
Spain is the next worst-hit, with 1,261 deaths since 1970. 2004 was the country’s worst year for terrorism, when 192 people died as Madrid bombings.
Thanks to the increasing of anti-terrorism awareness and security equipment such as PD140 handheld metal detector, we could see there less less killing recent years.
