Entries Tagged 'EOD' ↓

In Suspect Denies Ties to German Bomb Plot, Souad Mekhennet and Nicholas Kulish report in the New York Times, dated 12 October, report on the case of a young GermanT man of Turkish extraction who

Atilla Selek, a young German man with Turkish parents, stands at the heart of the investigation here into the reports of a terrorist plot that shocked this nation last month. He is in Turkey, a free man for now, though he says he is under constant surveillance.

Intelligence officials say that Mr. Selek, 22, trained at a terrorist camp in Pakistan and was part of the inner circle of plotters, including the three who were arrested last month and accused of planning what the authorities say would have been a series of deadly bombings. Mr. Selek vehemently denies the accusations.

- snip -

This stood out:

German investigators are working to build a case against the three men under arrest and seven other people they say were associates in the suspected plot, which increasingly appears to have a Turkish connection. In the German federal court in Karlsruhe last week, a 15-year-old German boy of Tunisian descent testified that he had unwittingly carried the detonators from Istanbul to Germany, a security official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing a closed-door hearing.

The German magazine Spiegel reported that the boy had carried a package that included a pair of shoes and that the detonators had been hidden inside the soles of the shoes, to Fritz Gelowicz, one of the men in custody and a friend of Mr. Selek in Ulm. They attended the same religious centers, the Multi-Kultur-Haus and the Islamic Information Center, both of which German authorities say were sources of extreme Islamist teaching. The Multi-Kultur-Haus was closed by state authorities in December 2005.

If accurate, this group - or “cell” - didn’t have the sophistication to manage detonation by themselves. Detonation doesn’t necessarily call for sophisticated technology:

The explosive train, also called an initiation sequence or firing train, is the sequence of charges that progresses from relatively low levels of energy to initiate the final explosive material or main charge. There are low- and high-explosive trains. Low-explosive trains are as simple as a rifle cartridge, including a primer and a propellant charge. High-explosives trains can be more complex, either two-step (e.g., detonator and dynamite) or three-step (e.g., detonator, booster of primary explosive, and main charge of secondary explosive). Detonators are often made from tetryl and fulminates.  Source.

It’s not, in my view, bad news.

Noah Schactman on the cycles of innovation and counter-innovation between insurgent-placed IEDs and coalition forces, in Danger Room:

Radio-controlled bombs used to be the biggest killer of American troops in Iraq. Now, they’ve been rendered all-but-useless. Good news, right? Like so much else in Iraq, it’s not quite that simple.

Since the Iraq insurgency began, mobile phones, garage-door openers, and remotely-driven kids’ toys have all been used to trigger improvised explosive devices from afar. In response, the U.S. military has cobbled together an arsenal of radio-frequency jammers, to interrupt the deadly signals before they can set off the bombs. At first, the jammers had all kinds of troubles. Each type of jammer would only cover a relatively small slice of the spectrum. And they’d drive friendly radio and robots haywire.

But those problems have largely been fixed, troops across Iraq report.  The newer jammers have effectively killed off radio-controlled IEDs in major chunks of the country.

The explosive cat-and-mouse game continues, though. The American have built up high-tech bomb-stoppers. So the insurgents have gone ever lower-tech than before. They’ve largely turned towards so-called “command wire” IEDs to attack U.S. targets.

Pairs of insulated copper threads, some not much thicker than a hair, are buried under the Iraqi dust, and strung out for as long as a kilometer. At the end, an insurgent triggerman waits – sometimes in a buried bunker. It’s a more crude approach to killing, of course.  But, barring a lucky find of wires, “there’s no way for us to defeat it,” says one bomb technician.  And those wires are getting attached to bigger and bigger bombs.

[picture above, of a  cement-mixer-turned-shaped-charge. From Danger Room]

- snip -

Do away with one problem, and you now have to cope with the blowback from your success.
- snip -

Anyway, command-wire bombs aren’t the only IED threat over here. “Pressure plate” weapons, triggered by the smallest stress, are also in vogue here. Some are even shoved into brown ration packets, and left by the side of the road. Insurgents continue to use passive infrared sensors — like those used in burglar alarms – to sense changes in heat, and trigger a bomb accordingly. Many Humvees here are equipped with a flash-type device that can prematurely set the trigger off. But there will surely be a counter to our countermeasure.

Schachtman is on the money. The relative positions of the two forces don’t appear to make it likely that either side will have a distinct advantage with any longevity.

There is one way to deal with a problem of this sort: it’s to make a majority of the local population identify with soldiers, make them believe that the soldiers are acting out of a desire to protect them. That delicate opportunity slipped out of our hand in 2003, and it’s been moving away from us since.

GoodMagazine reports that that Denmark-based ARESA has conducted successful field tests with its genetically modified Thale Cress, for use in land mine detection.

Thale Cress, also known as Arabidopsis thaliana, commonly called arabidopsis, or mouse-ear cress, has a short life cycle - six weeks from germination to mature seed.The ARESA modified Thale Cress is very sensitive to nitrogen, which is a component of the explosives in land mines, and emitted in tiny amounts.

Photo (Aresa) by Henrik Freek; via GoodMagazine.

The Thale Cress

has been genetically modified to provide a natural warning in the presence of land mines. Thales cress is inherently sensitive to nitrogen dioxide, a chemical byproduct of land mines. The Copenhagen-based biotech company Aresa tweaked the weed’s genes so that its leaves would turn from their natural green to bright red in the presence of latent explosives. Field tests have thus far been successful, meaning traditional methods of human and canine mine detection may soon have a less dangerous alternative.

From Ben Jervey’s post in Good Magazine .While there are good reasons to have reservations about the genetic modification of plants, until and unless the powers that have been responsible for placing land mines start removing them, this seems an excellent technology.

Ben Jervey is also the editor of GreenAppleGuide.