Mark Tapscott of the Heritage Foundation has been following the October 1st Campus suicide of University of Oklahoma engineering student Joel Henry Hinrichs III, outside the Stadium during the Oklahoma – Kansas State football game. His summary post on the Oklahoma Campus Bombing today outlines why he now believes this was intended as an Islamic terrorist attack. Read the entire post for details but points #1 and #4 are telling.
1. Hinrichs is the only one of the average annual 30,000 suicides in this country during the past decade to blow himself up. That makes his death what statisticians refer to as an extreme outlier.The explosive used in Oklahoma is a product developed and utilized by Islamic bomb makers who call it ‘Mother of Satan’ for the dangerous volatility of the compound. Jihadists will utilize any available explosive but this one comes in handy since it can be made from common chemicals.
4. Given #3 above, the choice of a chemical compound known among Middle East terrorists as "Mother of Satan" is more likely a political statement than an indicator of personal pain.
TATP: A new terrorist explosive, triacetone triperoxide (TATP), has recently appeared as a weapon in the Middle East. TATP has been used by suicide bombers in Israel, and was chosen as a detonator in 2001 by the thwarted "shoe bomber" Richard Reid.Michelle Malkin has links to explosive devices found near the UCLA campus Friday afternoon and on the Georgia Tech campus this morning. Anti-War sentiment is nurtured and thrives in an Academic America unwilling to understand an ideology of divine murder can not be ignored or discussed away. Living in a campus town, I hope the ‘War Is Not The Answer’ crowd doesn’t have their heartfelt pacifism blow up in their face. I also know there will be plenty of kids dressed as terrorists on State Street this Halloween.
TATP can be easily prepared in a basement lab using commercially available starting materials obtained from, e.g., hardware stores, pharmacies, and stores selling cosmetics. TATP is a fairly easy explosive to make, as far as explosives manufacturing goes. All it takes is acetone, hydrogen peroxide (3% medicinal peroxide is not concentrated enough), and a strong acid like hydrochloric or sulfuric acid.
London Bombings: In initial reports from the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, police officials said the bombs' destructive power and small size meant they must have been made using high explosives, not a crude homemade concoction. Soon, though, it became clear that they were homemade bombs, the explosive perhaps mixed in a bathtub and distilled in a kitchen, its chemical components available at the local pharmacist. Chemists call it acetone peroxide, triacetone triperoxide (TATP) or tri-cyclo, but to Middle Eastern bomb makers, its power and unpredictability have earned it the nickname Mother of Satan.
