"Bombs Are Simple, Cheap, Deadly"

Thursday, July 5, 2007

Homemade, Cheap and Dangerous
Terror Cells Favor Simple Ingredients In Building Bombs
By Craig Whitlock
The Washington (DC) Post


LONDON, -- The 39-page memo recovered from an al-Qaeda laptop computer in
Pakistan three years ago read like an Idiot's Guide to Bombmaking. Forget
military explosives or fancy detonators, it lectured. Instead, the manual
advised a shopping trip to a hardware store or pharmacy, where all the
necessary ingredients for a terrorist attack are stocked on the shelves.

"Make use of that which is available at your disposal and . . . bend it to
suit your needs, (improvise) rather than waste valuable time becoming
despondent over that which is not within your reach," counseled the author
of the memo, Dhiren Barot, a British citizen who said he developed his
keep-it-simple philosophy by "observing senior planners" at al-Qaeda
training camps.

Barot, who was later captured near London and is serving a 30-year sentence,
had envisioned an attack with multiple car bombs that would detonate
liquid-gas cylinders encased in rusty nails -- a strategy with striking
similarities to an attempt last week by a suspected terrorist cell to blow
up three vehicles in London and Glasgow, Scotland.

Counterterrorism officials have warned for years that Osama bin Laden and
his lieutenants have tried to obtain weapons of mass destruction, such as a
nuclear device or chemical or biological weapons. In response, U.S. military
and intelligence agencies have invested vast amounts of money to block their
acquisition.

So far, however, al-Qaeda and its affiliates have relied almost solely on
simple, homemade bombs crafted from everyday ingredients -- such as
nail-polish remover and fertilizer -- when plotting attacks in Europe and
the United States.

The makeshift bombs lack the destructive potential of the conventional
explosives that rake Iraq on a daily basis. They are also less reliable, as
demonstrated by the car bombs that failed to go off in London last week
after the culprits tried to ignite them with detonators wired to cellphones.

But other attempts have generated plenty of mayhem and damage, including the
kitchen-built backpack bombs that killed 52 people in the London public
transit system on July 7, 2005.

"It makes no difference to your average person if somebody puts a car bomb
out there that is crude or one that is sophisticated," said Chris
Driver-Williams, a retired British major and military intelligence officer
who studies explosive devices used by terrorist groups. "If it detonates,
all of a sudden you've got a very serious device and one that has achieved
exactly what the terrorists wanted."

The advantages of homemade explosives are that they are easy and cheap to
manufacture, as well as difficult for law enforcement agencies to detect.
According to one expert, the peroxide-based liquid explosives that an
al-Qaeda cell allegedly intended to use to blow up nine transatlantic
airliners last summer would have cost as little as $15 a bomb.

It is technically simple to make such explosives. Instructions are widely
available on the Internet. Experts added, however, that it takes skill and
sophistication to construct a viable bomb by adding timing devices,
detonators or secondary charges.

Investigations have found evidence that most al-Qaeda cells involved in
bombing plots in Europe have received training in camps in Pakistan or
Afghanistan, or were tutored by graduates of those camps.

Among them: cell members involved in the July 7, 2005, bombings in Britain
and a separate plot two weeks later that also targeted the London subway.
The suspected ringleaders of the May 16, 2003, bombings in Casablanca were
also al-Qaeda camp veterans who had experimented in explosives. Richard
Reid, who tried to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami
in 2001, was taught how to build his shoe bomb in Afghanistan.

Stephen Swain, former head of the international counterterrorism unit at
Scotland Yard in London, said the culprits in each case had been trained by
seasoned al-Qaeda operatives "without a shadow of a doubt."

"It's a common thread throughout the entire theater of al-Qaeda-style
operations," said Swain, who retired last year and is a senior consultant
for Control Risks Group, an international security firm. "There's quite a
lot of training going on in this regard."

Simple Recipes

Terrorist groups have been using homemade explosives for years. In February
1993, Islamic radicals drove a truck loaded with about 1,500 pounds of urea
nitrate -- a fertilizer-based explosive -- and hydrogen-gas cylinders into a
garage underneath the World Trade Center.

The bomb killed six people and injured more than 1,000. Investigators
determined that the cell built the bomb in New Jersey by consulting manuals
brought from Pakistan. Two years later, the ringleader of the plot, Ramzi
Yousef, tried but failed to use homemade liquid explosives to down 11
airliners crossing the Pacific Ocean.

The same year, Timothy J. McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal
Building in Oklahoma City with a truck bomb consisting of 5,000 pounds of
fuel oil and fertilizer, killing 168 people.

Since then, it has become more difficult to purchase large quantities of
fertilizer without attracting attention; sellers in the United States and
many European countries are supposed to notify authorities of suspicious
customers.

The last known attempt by al-Qaeda to construct a fertilizer-based bomb in
Europe came in 2003, when a cell operative bought 1,200 pounds of bagged
Kemira GrowHow fertilizer for about $200 from an agricultural supply store
in Britain. The salesman, John Stone, later testified that he thought the
transaction was strange because it was the wrong time of year to apply the
substance and the buyer claimed to have only a small garden plot.

"I hope you're not going around bombing anything," Stone said he told the
buyer half-jokingly, although the salesclerk did not notify police.

British authorities were tipped off soon after, however, by an employee at a
rental-storage center where the cell was keeping the fertilizer. In April,
five members of the group were convicted in the plot, known as Operation
Crevice. Many European fertilizer manufacturers have since reduced the
amount of ammonium nitrate, a key bomb ingredient, in their products.

Partly as a result, European and U.S. counterterrorism officials said
terrorist cells are increasingly turning to peroxide-based explosives, which
can be made in much smaller quantities from materials available at
drugstores.

The most commonly used compound is triacetone triperoxide, or TATP. Primary
ingredients for a homemade batch typically include acetone, which can be
found in nail-polish remover, and hydrogen peroxide, a chemical used in
hair-bleaching products.

TATP wields about 85 percent of the explosive power of TNT and can be made
in a kitchen or bathroom. A dime-size amount of the explosive can ignite a
fireball the size of a basketball.

'Nobody Ever Stops Me'

The risky side of TATP is that it is highly unstable. A spark or light
friction can detonate the explosive, making it extraordinarily difficult to
handle. Experts and police said there have been numerous cases in which
suspected terrorists -- as well as foolhardy amateur chemists -- have set
off accidental explosions, resulting in death or severe injuries.

"You need to concentrate the chemicals," said Hans J. Michels, a professor
of chemical engineering at Imperial College in London. "It's a filthy job
and it's dangerous, but it can be done."

Despite the dangers, al-Qaeda cells have used peroxide-based explosives in
more than a dozen plots in the past decade, including the July 7 and 21,
2005, London incidents, as well as attacks in Casablanca, Istanbul and the
Indonesian island of Bali, according to counterterrorism officials. Danish
police also discovered TATP in September during the arrest of seven
terrorism suspects in Odense.

In crystalline form, TATP looks like powdered sugar and is difficult to
detect in airports; security officials need to examine an exposed surface
with a swab kit or other tester to determine its presence.

"TATP and peroxide-based explosives are concern number one for the aviation
industry," said Ehud Keinan, a chemistry professor at Technion-Israel
Institute of Technology and a leading researcher on the substance. "It will
take some time before we are protected. Right now, we are not."

Reached by telephone in Paris, where he was scheduled to give a lecture
about TATP on Wednesday at an international conference, Keinan said he often
carries a small sample of the volatile compound in his carry-on luggage when
he flies -- just to test airport security. "Nobody ever stops me," he said.

When asked if it might be dangerous to sit next to him on a plane, he said,
"If you know how to take care of it, it's okay. If you don't know what
you're doing, you're in trouble."

U.S. Homeland Security officials have said terrorism suspects arrested last
August in Britain on charges that they were plotting to blow up several
transatlantic airliners might have been planning to smuggle on board TATP or
a related compound, HMTD, hexamethylene triperoxide diamine. Experts said it
would take as little as one or two quarts of those explosives to down a
large plane.

TATP was discovered in the late 19th century but was deemed to have no
industrial or commercial applications because it was so unstable.
Researchers generally ignored the substance until 1980, when Palestinian
fighters used it for the first time in a bomb in Israel.

Palestinian bombers have used it ever since. TATP was used for the first
time in an attack in Europe in July 1994, when Palestinians exploded a car
bomb outside the Israeli Embassy in London.

U.S. and European counterterrorism investigators paid limited attention to
the explosive until the July 2005 bombings in London. Afterward, the New
York City Police Department built an exact replica of the apartment in
Leeds, England, that the July 7 conspirators allegedly used to manufacture
their backpack bombs.

Hugh O'Rourke, deputy inspector of the NYPD counterterrorism division, said
the police department wanted to show beat officers what a kitchen-counter
TATP production line would look like. He said it is easy to mistake the
white powder and its cooking tools -- such as pool cleaners, large tubs or
commercial-size fans -- for a common drug lab.

"Patrol cops see a lot of white powder, think it's crack, and want to touch
it and package it," which could easily result in an explosion, he said. "We
don't want them doing that."

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