The Transportation Security Administration is warning truck owners and rental agencies to be "vigilant" about "ramming attacks" in which vehicles are used as instruments of death and terror, NBC News reported.
The unclassified report – "Vehicle ramming attacks: Threat landscape, indicators and counter measures" – was sent Tuesday to local law enforcement agencies and private companies working with the Department of Homeland Security, the outlet reported.
The report recounts that in the past three years, at least 173 people have been killed and more than 700 wounded in 17 ramming attacks around the world, NBC News reported. Of the 17 attacks, 13 resulted in fatalities.
"No community, large or small, rural or urban, is immune to attacks of this kind by organized or 'lone wolf' terrorists," the report noted, NBC News reported.
Most of the deaths, the TSA reports, took place in two attacks: the 87 killed by a lone Islamic terrorist using a commercial truck in Nice, France, on Bastille Day, July 14, last year, and the 43 killed when Islamic terrorists in two SUVs plowed through a crowded market in Urumqi, the capital of China's Xingjang province.
Although only four of the attacks used commercial trucks, the TSA said they are particularly effective as killing machines.
"Commercial vehicles — distinguished by their large size, weight and carrying capacity — present an especially attractive mechanism for vehicle ramming attacks because of the ease with which they can penetrate security barriers and the large-scale damage they can inflict on people and infrastructure."
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