LONDON:
Pakistan has emerged as the world’s eighth most dangerous country in a latest analysis of the top 10 danger zones based on terrorist and rebel activity.
The IntelCenter’s ‘Top 10 Most Dangerous Countries’ list as of March 2015 is topped by the Middle East, with Iraq and Syria ranked No 1 and 2 respectively.
IntelCenter’s Country Threat Index (CTI) examines the volume of terrorist and rebel alerts, messaging traffic, videos, photos, incidents and the number killed and injured in a country and runs it through an algorithm to assign the country its CTI.
The higher the CTI the greater the risk.
In India’s neighbourhood, Pakistan with a CTI of 122 is joined by Afghanistan with a CTI of 186 and ranked fifth.
“A low CTI does not necessarily reflect the absence of risk as the US in the lead-up to 9/11 would have had a low CTI. It does, however, reflect a lower level of activity over the preceding 30 days (of the analysis), which means high-volume activity is unlikely but one-off events are always a possibility,” IntelCenter, a Washington-based company working for intelligence agencies said in a statement.
“The CTI should never be the sole measure of risk in a country but rather one factor to take into consideration. The CTI is based solely on terrorist and rebel related activity. It does not evaluate other risk factors such as crime and political instability,” it said.
The countries completing the top 10 include Nigeria (3rd), Somalia (4th), Libya (6th), Yemen (7th), Ukraine (9th) and Egypt (10th).
The Global CTI is arrived at by adding up each individual country’s CTI. It serves as an overall indicator of global terrorist and rebel activity, it added. (AGENCIES)