Forum users discuss how to use Christmas lights, bleach, sugar and matches to make homemade bombs for use in America
Members of ISIS forums
are encouraging “lone wolf” bomb attacks in some of America’s most
high-profile tourist locations: New York, Las Vegas and Texas.
A post in an ISIS message
board, created three weeks ago and resurfaced in the last 24 hours with
renewed urgency, includes a comprehensive guide to building pipe bombs
using easily obtained materials like match-heads, sugar and Christmas
lights. The post was titled “To the lone wolves in America: How to make a
bomb in your kitchen, to create scenes of horror in tourist spots and
other targets”, and suggests targeting Times Square and Las Vegas in
particular, but also says that tourist sites in Texas, and metro
stations throughout the U.S. would make good targets.
The post, spotted in an ISIS forum by Vocativ’s deep web monitoring software, Verne, includes images
and detailed instructions reproduced from the summer 2010 edition of an
English-language Al Qaeda magazine called Inspire. The
section from the magazine was created for an English-speaking audience,
and was jovially entitled “How to make a bomb from the kitchen of your
mom”, with a credit to “The AQ Chef”. The guide was allegedly
used by the Tsarnaev brothers to carry out the Boston Marathon bombings
in 2013, and highlights the destructive efficacy of making a bomb using
a pressure cooker. In the forum, the English post was re-translated
back into Arabic. Despite the report specifically calling out Times
Square and the Las Vegas strip as suggested targets, neither the NYPD
nor the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department responded to requests
for information from Vocativ.
The post describes the necessary bomb-making ingredients
as being easy to obtain, easy to dispose of quickly, and difficult to
detect, even by police sniffer dogs. It goes into detail about how to
pack the bomb with shrapnel-like pieces of metal for maximum effect,
what kinds of casings to use depending on where the bomb will be
deployed, how to ensure the safety of the bomber, and where to place a
bomb to create the most carnage. They also advise would-be bomb-makers
on how to cover their tracks so as not to leave evidence on the device.
The conversation initiated by the post appears to involve knowledgeable
individuals with a strong desire to spread their know-how to others.
Vocativ spoke to several experts in the homeland security
and explosives fields who said that while the bomb-making recipes were
rudimentary and far from novel, they were potentially viable.
A veteran law enforcement and bomb expert, who spoke to us
on the condition of anonymity, said that the directions posted on
the forum were basic but potentially lethal.
“This is a viable [bomb] recipe. It happens to be accurate
stuff. The person has a working knowledge of explosives and it’s
consistent with what we’ve seen before out of the Al Qaeda and the
Arabian Peninsula and their publications.”
“This is not new information or new techniques. Save for
the excerpt in the beginning this is consistent with what’s been around
since the 1960s or 1970s,” he said. The Anarchists’ Cookbook was
famously published in 1970, for example, including instructions on how
to make rudimentary bombs. Many similar manuals exist online today.
While the techniques are generally not new the pointed
nature of the discussion underneath the cut-and-paste manual was
worrying, he said.
“The techniques aren’t what worries me,” the expert said.
“The fact is they could start going on making these at home and the
forum seems to encourage and motivate would-be bomb makers; including
suggesting possible targets,” he said.
“I personally prefer the evening congestion,” one forum
user said, in a lengthy post describing how to blend into and disappear
amid crowds.
Some of the claims discussed in the forum are far-fetched.
For instance, one forum user suggests a way to produce powdered
chlorine to add a chemical element to a bomb, which, although
scary-sounding, falls far short of being actionable, according to
experts consulted by Vocativ.
Similarly, chemistry professor and explosives expert
Jimmie Oxley, from the University of Rhode Island, told
Vocativ: “They’re trying to explain how to make a device the same way
poor man’s James Bond, as I call them, Do It Yourself books did. “
Oxley said that these sorts of home-baked bomb-making recipes have been bartered online for years.
“If you look a number of websites in English, you can see kids passing back and forth their favorite [bomb] recipes all the time.”
“If you look a number of websites in English, you can see kids passing back and forth their favorite [bomb] recipes all the time.”
The post may have been posted online in the hope that some disaffected individuals, perhaps inspired by
but not linked in any formal way to ISIS and their recent acts, may
take the initiative of making an unpredictable strike on a U.S.
target–much like the Tsarnaev brothers did in Boston. Lone wolves,
acting on inspiration but without affiliation to overseas groups, are
much more more difficult for authorities to track, and their behaviours
are therefore unpredictable.
The comments below the bomb-making contained a mix of
congratulations and Q&A. “There is no stronger [chemical] agent from
this agent?” one user inquires. “I have heard that you can make yellow
explosive powder from boiling two liters of chlorine…”
The conversation also highlights the potentially serious
intent of these users. “How many people can be killed if you use the
pipe in the size we see in the example and if all the conditions are
right and the victim is close to the bomb? One person or two or more?,”
asks one user. “The number of victims will be higher if there will be
more agent,” says another.
Author: M.L. Nestel
Deep Web Reporting By: Gilad Shiloach and Amit Weiss vocativ.com
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