Terror bombs seized

[demdave]

An al Qaeda plot to blast London was dramatically foiled by police today.

Seven hundred police swooped in a series of 6am raids in the capital and the Home Counties. They found half a tonne of fertiliser explosives - enough for a series of terror "spectaculars".

The terrorist suspects arrested by police are believed to have chosen "soft targets" for bombings including pubs and clubs. One of the suspects being held had a job at Gatwick Airport, immediately raising concerns over airlines and passengers.

A total of eight men - all of them British citizens of Pakistani descent, three of them teenagers - were arrested in the operation, with police from five forces searching a total of 24 addresses across London and the South-East.

http://www.thisislondon.com/til/jsp/modules/Article/print.jsp?itemId=9969473

[tlcandie]

1. Well, I guess that soon they will have to round up ALL ME people

and haul them off to Gitmo as it seems that Al Qaeda has now morphed to where it includes women (LINK TV's Mosaic where two women walked to a public bldg in one of the smaller important US allied countries while wired with bombs and exploded themselves) and children!!

/sarcasm off


I watch LINK TV and FSTV...the people in those countries are NOT happy with the US nor those backing them!!

[truthisfreedom]

2. sounds pretty darned spectacular, actually. isn't this a good thing?

[Barrett808]

3. Safer. Safer. Safer. <repeat/>

[demdave]

4. Safer than Spain at least.

Isn't the entire idea to catch these things BEFORE they happen?

[toska]

5. Blair must be tickled pink

I'm waiting for this to happen in the US. A successful terrorist strike would be a disaster for Bush. But very visibly preventing an attack would be a gold mine. It satisfies Bush's need to have an enemy to scare people about and would "prove" that he could protect us.

[kysrsoze]

6. I'm extremely happy they were caught

You know how much 1,000 lbs. of fertilizer bomb would blow up? I believe that is more than was used in the OK bombing. That would have been REALLy bad.

Of course, it begs the question - how safe are we in the US and UK? Not safe at all, if you ask me.

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. This report dramatizes it a bit

the other reports (eg http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/3581687.stm) only ever talk about the ammonium nitrate in its fertiliser form. So its "have now been made safe" is hyperbole. All other reports say the bomb(s) hadn't been constructed yet.

Not necessarily how much was used in the OK bomb, but CNN says 4000 lbs of ammonium nitrate was purchased (http://edition.cnn.com/2004/LAW/03/30/nichols.trial.ap/).

[DoNotRefill]

9. "fertilizer bombs"....

are more than just Ammonium Nitrate. First, there must be a sensitizer, which is easy to come by, since it's just a petroleum product like diesel fuel or oil. The hard part to come up with are the detonators. ANFO isn't easy to set off as far as explosives go.

Even if you have good detonators, it's very hard to get a combustion ratio over 80%, due to the nature of ANFO. ANFO is an acceptable explosive only if you've got no size restraints, but it's unsuited for making compact bombs.

Until I see something that says that they had the other required equipment to make ANFO, I have to assume that what they seized was 20 bags of fertilizer, nothing more.

[mulethree]

13. Flying Bathtub

My experience with Ammonium Nitrate.

Came from an old "instant ice pack" from a first aid kit. Looked like the same Ammonium Nitrate you buy in a garden shop as a nitrogen fertilizer (44-0-0 I think).

Put an M-80 superfirecracker into a can, stuff the ammonium nitrate in around it, light fuse. You get a boom much bigger than an M-80 alone. It's not as big a boom as when you fill the same sized can with powder emptied from numerous M-80's.

This was flying bathtub experiments back in the early 80's. Cheap 90 lb steel bathtub inverted over the can. A M-80 lifts the tub up a few inches, M-80 + 4oz of ammonium nitrate sends it 4-5 ft up, M-80 + 4oz of the cheap nitrocellulous powder from numerous (14 I think it was) M-80's sends the tub up about 25 feet. Sounds boring now, but it sure was a beautiful thing, that flying bathtub.

So I guess we were getting far far below a 80% burn efficiency.

[Guy_Montag]

8. Might they just be farmers?

Or growing pot on an epic scale.

[newyawker99]

12. Hi Guy_Montag!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[maxsolomon]

10. notice: the POLICE stopped the plot.

not the army.

in the face of those who dismiss kerry as 'wanting to treat terror as a police issue'.

the military is too blunt an instrument to stop terror.

[Guy_Montag]

11. Fertiliser bombs were popular with the IRA & that lot

Car & van bombs mostly