Israel Matzav

Great news: Al-Qaeda working on surgically implanted bombs

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but unfortunately it may not be much longer. It's inevitable that when security 'improves' by being able to detect more things, terrorists respond by finding new things or better ways to hide them. That's what's happening in response to full body scans and 'enhanced' pat downs at American airports: Al-Qaeda is working feverishly to develop surgically implanted bombs.

"What is your opinion about surgeries through which I can implant the bomb ...inside the operative's body?" an apparent mad surgeon recently asked an online forum used by Al Qaeda affiliates.

He called on bombmakers and doctors to cook up the perfect solution to murder "larger numbers of unbelievers and apostates."

"I am waiting for the interaction of the experienced brothers to connect the two sciences together and produce a new kind of terrorism, Allah willing," he wrote, according to a translation by terror experts at the SITE Intelligence Group.

...

Stitching a bomb into the abdominal cavity made of plastic or liquid explosives - such as semtex or PETN - was judged the best method.

"It must be planted near the surface of the body, because the human body absorbs shocks," advised one terrorist.

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Unproven body cavity bombs worry security agents, though "no one has figured out how to actually do it," said a counterterror official.

Last month, Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole said his agency wouldn't do cavity checks because secondary screening procedures and technology can find fuses and detonators, which must be outside the body.

"You have to have some external device to cause that initiation," he said. "That's what the advanced imaging technology machine will pick up: any anomaly outside of the body."

Still experts worry about the doctors among the terrorists' ranks and their willingness to kill. Al Qaeda's No. 2 is Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor, and last year a Jordanian doctor known as "Abu Dujana al-Khorasani" killed seven CIA officers in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan.

"In the same way that drug smugglers have placed bags of narcotics in the body cavities of animals and had people ingest condoms filled with drugs, it would not be out of the realm of Al Qaeda operational planners to conceive of such a technique," said Mark Rossini, a former senior FBI counterterror agent.

That's why you have to look for terrorists (like the Israelis do) and not for things. When will they ever learn?

Labels: al-Qaeda, enhanced pat downs, full body scanner, strip or grope, surgically implanted bombs

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:42 PM