Pakistan eighth most dangerous country in the world: report

The Middle East topped the list as of March 2015, with Iraq and Syria ranking first and second respectively

LONDON: Pakistan has emerged as the world’s eighth most dangerous country, according to IntelCenter's list of "Top 10 Most Dangerous Countries".

The Middle East topped the list as of March 2015, with Iraq and Syria ranking No 1 and 2 respectively, given the current political situation in the war-torn countries.

IntelCenter, a Washington-based company working for intelligence agencies, Country Threat Index (CTI) examines the volume of terrorist and rebel alerts, messaging traffic, videos, photos, incidents and the number of people killed and injured in a country over the past month and runs it through an algorithm to assign the country its CTI.

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Out of the top 10 most dangerous countries, Pakistan had a CTI of 122 is joined by Afghanistan with a CTI of 186. The neighbouring country ranked fifth on the list. The higher the CTI, the greater is the risk.

Source: IntelCenter

"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 said in a statement.

CTI should not be the sole measure of risk in a country but should merely be factored into consideration, the statement said.

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"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 further said.

The countries completing the top 10 include Nigeria (3rd), Somalia (4th), Libya (6th), Yemen (7th), Ukraine (9th) and Egypt (10th).

The Global CTI serves as an overall indicator of global terrorist and rebel activity and is calculated by adding up each individual country’s CTI, the statement said.

This article was originally published on The Economic Times