Attacks by terrorists up in '04, US reports

WASHINGTON -- International terrorist attacks rose sharply last year to 651 significant attacks worldwide, causing 1,907 deaths, according to a report released yesterday by the US government's National Counterterrorism Center.

The center, established last year by Congress, said 726 people died in 270 attacks in the Middle East, and attacks on civilians in Iraq increased from 22 in 2003 to 201 last year. Nine people died in 13 attacks in the Western Hemisphere, according to the report.

Americans made up about 1 percent of the total killed, wounded, and kidnapped.

The report prompted Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, to complain in a letter to the State Department that attacks across the globe had more than tripled. A State Department report last year counted 208 significant international terrorist attacks and 625 deaths in 2003.

But John Brennan, acting director of the counterterrorism center, told reporters yesterday that the latest figures were compiled using different methodology and far more rigorous analysis, and ''cannot be compared to previous years in any meaningful way."

The number of terrorist attacks has been a politically sensitive issue for the State Department since last year, when it touted success in the Bush administration's war on terrorism with an annual report that indicated attacks worldwide had declined, only to be forced to issue a corrected report that indicated they had actually increased.

Yesterday, the department issued a terrorism report without numbers, in tandem with the National Counterterrorism Center's report. The department's decision to omit the statistics from its congressionally mandated report ignited a firestorm in recent weeks, as critics of the administration suggested that it was seeking to hide an increase in attacks.

Federal officials briefed Waxman and other members of Congress on the new data Monday, but had not said when they would release the numbers to the public. State Department officials decided to release both reports after Waxman released the figures himself.

Yesterday's State Department report said Al Qaeda remained ''the primary terrorist threat to the United States in 2004." The report said progress had been made in the war on terrorism, noting that Iraq had been removed from the US list of state sponsors of terror, and that Sudan and Libya had taken positive steps. But the report said ''Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria, however, continued to maintain their ties to terrorism."

Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.