A Short Recent History of Pressure Cooker Bombs [View all]

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Source: Time

Authorities are now saying that the explosive devices in Boston were fashioned from pressure cookers. (Yes, like the closed pot you might use to cook rice at home.) As it happens, pressure cookers have a nefarious history in counterterrorism circles. In 2004, the Department of Homeland Security was concerned enough about pressure cooker bombs to issue an alert to federal and state security officials: “A technique commonly taught in Afghan terrorist training camps is the use/conversion of pressure cookers into IEDs,” the bulletin warned.

That bulletin cited several plots from 2002 to 2004 to use pressure cooker bombs in France, India and Nepal. But more recently there have been at least three other instances of would-be terrorists in the west, all of them Islamic radicals, in possession of pressure cookers for reasons that seemed not to involve having friends over for dinner. One was an Army private linked to the 2010 Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, who had reportedly been taking bomb-making tips from the al Qaeda’s short-lived (literally) magazine Inspire and had various weapons and explosives along with his cooking pot. (The magazine reportedly recommended pressure cookers as explosive devices.) A 2010 suicide bomber in Stockholm had rigged a pressure cooker bomb that failed to detonate. And as a newer DHS warning about the kitchen devices noted, the failed 2010 SUV bomb in New York’s Times Square was a pressure cooker device featuring 120 firecrackers. The same DHS memo refers to a March 2010 bombing with a pressure cooker at a western Christian aid agency in Pakistan that killed six people.

Counterterror officials are surely well aware of these facts and studying any leads that might link the device in Boston to Islamic radicals here or abroad. But it’s important to bear in mind that the ability to make these bombs is hardly unique to al Qaeda and its sympathizers. Details on how to make a pressure cooker bomb can also be found on websites associated with anarchy and other forms of non-religious radicalism, including this one, which describes how to build what is “affectionately known as a HELLHOUND.”




Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/04/16/a-s

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Some good background information.