AN Australian sociologist who has compiled a comprehensive database of suicide attacks claims bombers "are not mad" and there appears to be no set demographics for potential attackers.

He found there were more than 1,200 suicide attacks since 1981 killing at least 5,766 people. Iraq topped the list with 651 attacks occurring in the war-torn nation. This was three times as many as Israel/Palestine with 217 incidents, followed by Sri Lanka (93) and Lebanon (48).

Suicide bombers are not all poor, uneducated, religious fanatics or madmen, as many people believe. Research on the social and psychological background of terrorists show they tend to be more prosperous and better educated than most in their societies, and no more religious or irrational than the average person.

A study of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad suicide terrorists from the late 1980s to 2003 found only 13 per cent were from a poor background, compared with 32 per cent of the Palestinian population in general, according to a New Scientist report.

Suicide bombers were also three times more likely to have gone on to higher education than the general population, Claude Berrebi, an economist at Princeton University in the US, found.

While suicide terrorists invariably come from oppressed communities, recent research by psychologists, anthropologists and others suggests that they fit none of the other common profiles.

They are no less rational or sane, no worse educated, no poorer and no more religious than anyone else.

"They are like you and me," says Rohan Gunaratna, head of terrorism research at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore