Notable attacks, and attempted attacks, in the United States since 9/11

Successful

Oct.-Nov. 2001: Anonymous, anthrax-laced letters are sent to news organizations and two U.S. senators. Five people die and 17 are sickened. In 2008, the FBI concluded that the letters were sent by Bruce Ivins, a microbiologist at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases who had committed suicide a week earlier.

May 31, 2009: Scott Roeder, an antiabortion extremist, shoots and kills abortion doctor George Tiller during a Sunday service in the vestibule of a Wichita church. Roeder is later convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

June 1, 2009: American-born Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, 26, a convert to Islam, shoots into a military recruiting office in Little Rock, Ark., killing one Army soldier and wounding another. Police said he told them he was "mad at the U.S. military because of what they had done to Muslims in the past."

June 10, 2009: An 88-year-old white supremacist walks into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and opens fire, killing a security guard and sending visitors scrambling for cover, police say. The accused gunman, James W. von Brunn, dies in custody seven months later.

Nov. 5, 2009: Thirteen people are killed and 32 wounded at Ft. Hood, Texas, in an attack blamed on Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist. Witnesses testify later that Hasan shouted "Allahu akbar" – Arabic for "God is great" – before opening fire on a group of soldiers undergoing health checks in preparation for deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. Hasan is awaiting court-martial on 13 counts of premeditated murder.

Jan. 4, 2010: Johnny Lee Wicks, a 66-year-old retiree apparently upset over losing a lawsuit related to his Social Security benefits, opens fire in a Las Vegas federal courthouse lobby, killing a security officer and wounding another person. Wicks is killed in a shootout with court officers.

Feb. 18, 2010: A. Joseph Stack, a 53-year-old software engineer who had been feuding with the Internal Revenue Service, burns his house down, then flies a small plane into a building housing IRS employees. Stack and IRS worker Vernon Hunter are killed, and two people are seriously injured.

Failed/thwarted

Dec. 22, 2001: Richard Reid, a 28-year-old British citizen and Muslim convert, tries to set off two bombs in his sneakers on a trans-Atlantic flight heading to the U.S.  After a violent struggle at 30,000 feet, the 6-foot-4, 220-pound Reid is  subdued by flight attendants and at least six passengers and eventually sedated. Reid is later convicted and sentenced to three life sentences plus 110 additional years in prison.

March 2004: Officials reveal that Al Qaeda had planned to attack Los Angeles’ tallest building – Library Tower (now U.S. Bank Tower ) – and Chicago’s Sears Tower in the months after Sept. 11 as part of a second wave of strikes that was never carried out.

Feb. 10, 2006: FBI agents in Puerto Rico search five homes and a business to thwart what the agency said was a "domestic terrorist attack" planned by militants favoring independence for the U.S.  island territory.  Critics, however, accuse the FBI of using the specter of terrorism to turn the public against those advocating Puerto Rican independence.

Dec. 25, 2009: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, attempts to detonate explosives in his underwear aboard a Northwest Airlines jet over Detroit, but is thwarted by other passengers and the crew.  He tells interrogators that he had been trained and outfitted with the bomb by the Yemen-based branch of Al Qaeda.

May 1, 2010: Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani immigrant and naturalized U.S. citizen, parks an SUV loaded with three homemade bombs in New York’s Times Square and tries to set them off. They fail to detonate and Shahzad is arrested as he boards a flight out of the U.S. He is convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Nov. 27, 2010: Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a 19-year-old a naturalized U.S. citizen from Somalia, is arrested and accused of trying to explode a powerful car bomb amid throngs of people at a holiday ceremony in downtown Portland, Ore. Investigators say that Mohamud had been working with two men he thought were terrorists, but were actually undercover FBI agents.

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