TIMELINE of terror across the world

1993: Bin Laden linked by the US to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre.

1996: The US identifies bin Laden as the prime suspect in the bombing of the Khobar Towers military complex in Saudi Arabia.

August 1998: The first acknowledged mass-casualty al-Qaida attack takes place at the US Embassy in Kenya. A total of 219 people are killed.

October 2000: A suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen kills 17 sailors.

September 11 2001: Hijacked passenger jets are flown into the World Trade Centre in New York. The attacks on New York and the Pentagon, as well as the hijacked plane that crashes into a field in Pennsylvania, claim nearly 3,000 lives – the world’s worst act of terrorism.

December 2001: An attempted suicide attack on a Paris to Miami airliner by London-born shoe bomber Richard Reid, an al-Qaida sympathiser, is thwarted.

In early 2002 Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is kidnapped in Pakistan and beheaded by al-Qaida.

October 12 2002: Two bombs explode in a busy nightclub area on the Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people, including 28 Britons.

November 28 2002: A vehicle packed with explosives ploughs into the Paradise Hotel near the port of Mombasa in Kenya, killing 11 Kenyans and three Israeli tourists. In a simultaneous attack, two missiles are fired at an Israeli passenger plane nearby, but narrowly miss.

May 13 2003: A series of suicide bombings in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, kill at least 34 people, in attacks on foreign compounds.

March 11 2004: Two-and-a-half years after the September 11 attacks, a series of bombs rip through commuter trains in Madrid, killing more than 200 people.

July 7 2005: A total of 52 people are killed and more than 700 injured in four attacks on London’s transport network.

December 27 2007: Al-Qaida are linked to the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

December 25 2009: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian graduate, tries to blow up an aeroplane with explosives in his underwear.

October 2010: The network is linked to a major international terror alert when explosives are found hidden in toner cartridges on board planes at East Midlands Airport in the UK and Dubai.

May 1 2011: US President Barack Obama announces that Osama bin Laden has been killed.