Airport screeners in the U.S. and overseas are being told to be on the lookout for suspicious pillows, coats and even stuffed animals that may have had special chemicals applied to them that can transform them into bombs.
The Department of Homeland Security is warning airports all over the world about suspicious stuffed items among luggage after U.S. intelligence concluded that al-Qaeda operatives are being trained to conceal ‘nitrocellulose’ chemical inside the cotton fibers of these items, which makes them highly combustible.
Intelligence officials have confiscated al-Qaeda manuals and picked up several indications that the network is attempting to create the chemical called nitrocellulose to fashion explosive devices that could be smuggled aboard jetliners, The Washington Post quoted Homeland officials as saying.
Police1 notes that Law Enforcement should be aware of these types of bombs as they could be used in other types of attacks, such as homicide bombings, domestically.
“We judge this type of threat to be real and continuing,” the department said in the Aug. 8 warning. It noted there has been “persistence [in a] line of reports from several credible, independent sources” that al Qaeda is training to build such bombs. Among other things, confiscated al Qaeda training manuals show the sophistication of its preparations, the document said.
Explosives experts said that the detonating power of a nitrocellulose bomb depends on numerous factors--but most particularly on how tightly the cotton-like material is packed. If small free-standing wisps of it are set on fire, they could blaze up quickly and die down just as fast. But large wads of it tightly crammed into a container of some kind could create a booming detonation, they said. According to a former director of the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators, Gregory G Baur, producing such explosives requires some degree of expertise.
Items such as buttons, zippers or wristwatches could be used in tandem with tightly packed nitrocellulose as power sources or ignition components to set off a detonation, the directive said.
Nitrocellulose is similar in its combustibility to black powder, a substance used as a propellant in ammunition. Also called guncotton or cellulose nitrate, it can be created by combining cotton or cottonlike material with nitric acid or sulfuric acid, substances that are used in various forms to clean drains and by artists in metal etching. Mixing in nitroglycerine makes the mixture even more dangerous. If dried carefully, it emits no odor, but if dried incompetently, it has a slight etherlike smell.
Officials said that while airport X-ray machines cannot detect nitrocellulose, another type of technology called a trace-detection machine can. The Homeland Security Department’s Transportation Security Administration has purchased several thousand trace-detection machines in the past year as part of a broader effort to check for explosives in checked baggage.
The authorities started paying more attention to children’s toys after screeners found in July a .22-caliber handgun hidden inside a teddy bear at a Florida airport checkpoint.
Source: DHS; Washington Post