Over three people per 100,000 got murdered in Estonia in 2015, making the country’s murder rate the third highest in the European Union.
Only Lithuania (5.89 murders per 100,000 people) and Latvia (3.37) rank higher in the statistics, which prompted Euronews, a European news agency, title its news story, “Baltics are murder capital of Europe”.
Indeed, the murder rate in the Baltics is considerably higher than elsewhere in Europe. For example, the fourth in the list, Bulgaria, has a murder rate of 1.79 per 100,000 people, which is 1.8 times lower than Estonia’s 3.19.
This statistics were compiled by Eurostat, the statistics agency of the European Union.
The lowest number of murder victims relative to population was recorded in Austria (0.51), the Netherlands (0.62), Spain (0.65), the Czech Republic (0.75) and Italy (0.77).
In absolute terms, France recorded the highest number of murder victims (1,017 people, 21% of all murder victims recorded in the EU), followed by Germany (682, 14%), Poland (530, 11%) and Italy (469, 10%).
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Cover: Estonian policemen (image by Marina Lesnitskaya/Shutterstock/the image is illustrative).
