Thursday, October 06, 2005

This looks more and more like a Ramadan attack attempt

More information about the FREDS is slowly coming out, with Michelle Malkin having a boatload of links here. From what's available, seems like:
He had been attending services at a mosque and hanging out at the local Islamic Society.
He tried to buy an amount of ammonium nitrate.
He had attempted to get into the game, and ran when a guard wanted to search his backpack.
They took a buttload of explosives and/or materials to make them out of his apartment.
The trees around the explosion site show what appears to be damage from fragments.

You put all this together, and it looks more and more like what Little Green Footballs refers to as a 'work accident'. Especially with the FBI having pretty much taken over the investigation. Some parts of it, especially, like the apparent fragmentation effect(why add metal pieces to a bomb to kill yourself?) make it look like he had a lot more in mind that suicide. And if the information about tickets out of the country is correct, it points to a planned mass-homicide and plans to flee, with a work accident messing up the plans.

As to the disclaimers from the feds("No, no, no evidence of anything like terrorism"), they do not give me a great deal of confidence. They tend to deny damn near anything, on the theory that either a: anything they say may affect an investigation and/or b: everyone except themselves is a panicky idiot who can't be trusted with anything. Combine the newer stuff with what was known before, it looks like a big Ramadan surprise was planned and went wrong, with the FREDS either setting the stuff off by accident(TATP being very unstable) or setting it off deliberately if he thought he was about to be caught or- just possibly- set off remotely by someone else? That's happened a bunch of times in the Mid-East with the Palistinians and co. Question: did they find any bits of electronic debris that might point to a remote detonator? The only people who know aren't talking.

And this crap happened right near where my daughter lived when she went to OU. Which makes me just so damned happy.

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