The would-be bomber who left his smoldering SUV in the heart of Manhattan used the simplest ingredients: gasoline cans, propane tanks, the kind of ordinary black powder found in cheap fireworks.
But it was the simple nature of those components that made the attempted bombing relatively easy to execute and nearly impossible to detect, according to U.S. officials and terrorism experts.
Both the Times Square bombmaker and Najibullah Zazi, the Colorado man who pleaded guilty in the plot to bomb the New York subway system last fall, used recipes that required nothing more challenging than Internet research and a trip to the hardware store or beauty supply shop.
” ‘Unsophisticated’ can still cause a lot of pain and misery,” said a U.S. counterterrorism official who agreed to discuss the New York attempt on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigation.
Zazi received training in bombmaking in Pakistan, and terrorism experts cautioned against underestimating the capacity of lone-wolf operators to do significant damage.
“Often officials use the word ‘amateurish,’ when in fact the attempts turn out to be more complex than first portrayed,” said Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at Georgetown University. “Even if the bomb was amateurish, look at the target. New York has an image of being tough on terrorists, but that wasn’t enough to prevent someone from putting a car bomb in the city’s nerve center on a busy night.”
The Washington Post
