Jihadist’s Detonation of Bomb Hidden in Body Isn’t New Attack Method

Source: Homeland security today
by Anthony Kimery
Thursday, 01 October 2009

Matter of time before suicide bombers use more powerful bombs inside their bodies



In recent days, there’s been a flurry of reporting about the ostensibly novel new threat of jihadist suicide bombers detonating explosives that they’ve hidden inside their bodies. The concerns arose from the Aug. 28 detonation of about a pound of explosives that 23-year-old Al Qaeda suicide bomber Abdullah Hassan Tali' Al Asiri had hidden in his rectum.

Al Asiri exploded his internal bomb in an attempt to kill Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi Deputy Interior Minister in charge of Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism efforts. The prince sustained only a minor injury from the blast.

Al Asiri’s rectally concealed bomb wasn’t an especially new jihadist strategy, however. A year ago, Homeland Security Today revealed in its August 2008 investigative report, Making Black Magic, that determined jihadists had begun to experiment with all sorts of innovative – bizarre even – ways to secret suicide bombs, including hiding potentially powerful explosives inside their bodies.

While the British tabloid The Sun quoted an official as saying of Al Asiri's method of attack that “we've never heard of anything quite like this before," US and Western counterterrorists have in fact been aware of Al Qaeda’s experimentation with internal and other forms of bomb concealment methods for more than a year.

Harvey Kushner, chairman of the criminal justice department at Long Island University and author of Terrorism in America, The Future of Terrorism: Violence in the New Millennium, and the Concise Encyclopedia of Extremism and Terrorism, said more than two years ago that “terrorists are getting exponentially smarter.”

Indeed. According to counterterrorism experts, terrorists are coming up with more and more ways to slip past our first lines of defense.

And “to do so,” Homeland Security Today reported, “they’ve been experimenting with some really off the wall methods of deception to disguise their suicidal methodologies, like hiding upwards of three pounds of C-4, Semtex or some other plastic bonded explosive (PBX) rectally, vaginally and even surgically. The explosive could be remotely detonated while the bomb is inside terrorists’ bodies.”

“It’s gruesome stuff, to be sure,” Homeland Security Today reported, “but these suicidal terrorists are, in effect, the willing jihadist equivalents of drug ‘mules,’ the people - often indigent women and children - drug traffickers pay to ingest condoms or other similar material that is nearly filled to bursting with heroin or cocaine.”

In February 2008, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis even issued an intelligence advisory warning that Al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations might try to use women jihadists hiding explosives inside “pregnancy prosthetics … that mimic the look of a pregnant woman.”

The threat assessment said “female suicide bombers have used devices that make them appear pregnant to hide explosive devices.”

Earlier last year, terrorists did in fact use a crude form of deception in dispatching female jihadists. In Iraq, Al Qaeda used Muslim women wearing concealed suicide vests to carry out bombings after increased security and protective concrete walls made car bombings more difficult.

But as security authorities wised up to terrorists’ new ruses, the more astute among counterterrror intelligence authorities began pondering truly frightening, out-of-the-box scenarios that terrorists are believed to have studied to conceal a variety of explosives - like lining pregnancy prosthetics with sheet plastic explosives.

Homeland Security Today reported that these authorities had warned that the wearer may be able to get through airports that have no effective trace explosives sniffers or whole body imagers.

“This suddenly has become a very viable possibility,” a veteran counterterrorist said on background.

In its 2008 annual report, the Defense Department’s Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) stated that “for the foreseeable future,” terrorists’ “weapon of choice will continue to be the IED and they will continue to improvise new and dangerous ways to employ IEDs to overcome our technology advantage and achieve strategic influence.”

Al Asiri was a wanted Saudi militant from the Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) terrorist organization who’d declared that he’d renounced terrorism and had requested to meet Prince Nayef to repent and be accepted into the kingdom’s reformed terrorist amnesty program.

Such surrenders are not unprecedented. In February, former Guantanamo Bay inmate Mohammed Al Awfi, a terrorist who appeared with Al Asiri on Saudi Arabia’s list of most-wanted terrorists, surrendered in Yemen and was transported to Saudi Arabia where he renounced terrorism and entered into the kingdom’s amnesty program.

What sent shock waves through Saudi and Western counterterrorism security offices is not that Al Asiri was a “sleeper” Al Qaeda suicide bomber, but rather that he was able to pass through the layers of Saudi security with a bomb in his rectum to physically meet with the Prince.

Al Asiri avoided detection by security at two airports and by Saudi palace security, and then spent 30 hours with the prince's secret service agents without anyone suspecting anything suspicious.

The Al Qaeda-linked terrorist group AQAP posted a video and animation of Al Asiri’s suicide bombing technique through its media arm, the Al Malahem Foundation. Titled, “The Grandchildren of Muhammad ibn Maslamah,” the 17 minute video clearly is meant as propaganda for encouraging jihadists to use this and other fresh methods for carrying out suicide bombings.

In claiming responsibility for the attack, AQAP stated “…Abdullah Hassan Taleh Al Asiri, who was on the list of 85 wanted persons, was able, with the help of God, to enter Nayef’s palace as he was among his guards and detonate an explosive device. No one will be able to know the type of this device or the way it was detonated. Al Asiri managed to pass all the security checkpoints in Najran and Jeddah airports and was transported on board Mohammed bin Nayef’s private plane.”

Al Asiri’s suicide bombing failed because, authorities say, the force of the blast from the relatively small amount of explosive was suppressed by his body. But had, say, two or three pounds been detonated … “well, that may very well have killed” the prince, one knowledgeable counterterrorism official told HSToday.us.

“But Al Qaeda has learned from this – that I’m quite certain,” another veteran US counterterrorist told HSToday.us on background, noting that it’s only a matter of time before suicide bombers use more powerful explosives hidden inside their bodies, including having bombs surgically implanted inside them that can either be remotely detonated or triggered by the suicide bomber himself using a wireless trigger concealed in jewelry, a watch, “or something like that,” the official said.

Homeland Security Today reported on these disturbing new jihadist suicide bombing possibilities more than a year ago. It was revealed that counterterror intelligence analysts had examined information indicating Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations had studied the discipline of magic —techniques like classic misdirection, sleights, illusions … even gaffed tricks – to conceal weapons and explosives and to aid in carrying out attacks. These counterterrorists were concerned that some terrorists had experimented with using cleverly designed “close-up” parlor tricks to do things like sneak explosives on board an aircraft.
Counterterrorists told Homeland Security Today that terrorists have studied using various types of illusory devices to conceal thin applications of sheet explosives, for example. But these officials wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say whether terrorists have ever successfully used anything like this in a bombing - or whether they can effectively be detected, despite some of the very sophisticated trace explosive detection technologies now on the market and in use at airports around the world to detect bomb components in carry-on luggage and underneath a person’s clothing.

Counterterror experts have warned for years that future use of PBX and various sheet explosives by terrorists depended only on the imagination of the terrorists.

Intelligence authorities told Homeland Security Today that they are concerned about a variety of gimmicks that are traditionally reserved for illusionists with which terrorists may be experimenting, like gaffed coins and “thumb tips” – hollowed-out devices that are virtually indistinguishable from real coins and fingers inside which a thin layer of some form of PBX could be smeared.

This explosive could be detonated with a charge that could be hidden in some ordinary electronic device and would appear as part of the original circuitry. Or, it could simply be a musical greeting card, which contains miniature flat batteries and miniaturized circuit boards with electronic components. Such greeting cards have been used to detonate PBX bombs, these authorities said.

It’s unclear whether such hidden explosive material could be detected by certain explosive detection technologies that are in use at some airports.

HSToday.us reported in November 2007 that investigators for Congress’ investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), repeatedly were able to smuggle liquid bomb and other explosives components through dozens of TSA airport screening checkpoints that, once on board a plane, could have been assembled in as little as ten minutes. If successfully detonated, they could potentially have caused a “catastrophic” explosion, two senior GAO officials told lawmakers.

Because of obvious security concerns, the GAO officials who testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform could not say which airports they slipped by screeners, but John Cooney, assistant director of GAO Forensic Audits and Special Investigations, assured the Committee that “we got through!”

GAO’s undercover investigators actually got past TSA screeners with their liquid bomb-making components 19 times in 2007, and in 2006, they got past screeners 21 times with incendiary devices and bomb detonators that could have “caused not insignificant explosions.”

Counterterrorism authorities say the types of bomb-making components the GAO investigators smuggled past security screeners can still be smuggled past TSA screeners at many of the nation’s airports. And every week, TSA reports having found “artfully concealed prohibited items … at checkpoints.”

“The Al Asiri case has just uped the ante,” one told HSToday.us.

Peter Neuman, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence, and former director of the Center for Defense Studies at King's College London, told BBC News that the case undoubtedly will be studied intensively, adding there are "tremendous implications for airport security with the potential of making it even more complicated to get on to your plane."

"If it really is true that the metal detectors couldn't detect this person's hidden explosive device, that would mean that the metal detectors as they currently exist in airports are pretty much useless," Neuman said.

At American and other airports around the world, however, metal scanning machines can detect metal inside a person, like pace makers, steel plates holding bones together, etc., depending on the machines’ sensitivity settings. Indeed. Airline passengers often walk through metal detectors without the machine recognizing rings, belt buckles, and other small quantities of metal on a person.

It would only require a small amount of metal to make up the electronic circuitry for a bomb concealed inside a suicide bomber.

“As macabre as it is to try and wrap your brain around,” said one counterterrorism official, this circuitry could be placed in the chest cavity near the heart to mimic the location of a pace maker, for instance, should a hand wand be used to isolate metal inside a person.”

“This advances a whole new way of thinking about [jihadist] suicide bombers” and how to be on alert to them from “a security perspective,” the official stressed.
Authorities like Dr. Carl Ungerer, director of the National Security Project at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, believe that the Al Asiri case will heat up discussion about scanning technologies, like whole body imagers.

Whole body imagers though aren’t likely to detect explosives that are hidden inside a person - they're designed to detect what’s concealed underneath a person’s clothing.

Some sort of penetrating transmission X-ray scanner would most likely have to be used to detect explosives inside a person, but safety questions about the level of radiation emitted from such devices would have to be addressed, authorities explained, noting that up until now, “we haven’t been thinking about designing machines to look for bombs inside people,” as one put it.

Counterterror authorities say there'd been plenty of intelligence indicating that jihadists had been working on all sorts of bizarre methods for carrying out suicide attacks, including the method of Al Asiri's suicide bombing. Jihadist terrorist organizations will undoubtedly improve on his technique, they said, stressing that we're likely to see attacks using improved versions of internally concealed bombs - including bombs surgically implanted into a jihadist suicide bomber.

"Never underestimate the true believer," one of the authorities warned.