Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Purchasing Components
The best-case scenario is to legally purchase the components—meaning mostly
explosive precursors—taking advantage of either a lax security environment or gaps
in various countermeasures. Terrorists have used these holes to build homemade
explosives, perhaps not as powerful as a VBIED in terms of sheer power, but as
the 7/7 London bombings has illustrated, just as deadly. Homemade explosives are
inexpensive to buy and difficult to detect.
Times Square bomber Faizal Shazad purchased the components for his explo-
sive device from February to April 2010. He purchased the fertilizer and propane
from a store in Connecticut and bought approximately $195 worth of fireworks
from a Pennsylvania fireworks store.
The components used to destroy the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma
City were acquired through both legal and illegal means. On September 30, 1994,
Mike Havens entered the Mid-Kansas Cooperative Association in McPherson,
Kansas, and purchased 2000 pounds of ammonium nitrate. A few weeks later, on
October 18, 1994, a man calling himself Mike Havens returned to the Co-Op
and purchased another 2000 pounds of ammonium nitrate. The Co-Op employees
knew all their customers and did not recognize Havens, who said he was going to
use the ammonium nitrate to sow his wheat fields, a practice that had once been
popular among farmers in the community. In between the two purchases, a bur-
glary at the Martin Marietta rock quarry just outside of Marion County, Kansas,
was reported. One of the explosive magazines at the quarry had been burglarized.
The thieves stole 229 sticks of Tovex, aluminized water-gel dynamite, 93 rolls
of Primadet nonelectric blasting caps, and 544 electric blasting caps.
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Around
the same time, a man calling himself Shawn Rivers rented a storage facility at the
Herington Industrial Park in Herington, Kansas. A man calling himself Joe Kyle
rented a storage unit in Council Grove, Kansas, on October 17, just a day before
Mike Havens made his second purchase. On October 21, 1994, a man purchased
three 55-gallon barrels of nitromethane at $925 a barrel at a race track in Ennis,
Texas, from Tim Chambers of VP Racing Fuels. The purchaser told Chambers that
he used nitromethane to fuel the motorcycles he raced in Oklahoma City. he buyer
paid in cash. The investigation that took place after April 19, 1995, revealed that
Mike Havens was Terry Nichols, and Shawn Rivers was actually Timothy McVeigh,
who was also the unidentified buyer of the nitromethane in Ennis, Texas.
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In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, legislation was enacted to make
buying large amounts of ammonium nitrate more difficult, and it has become more
difficult to purchase large amounts of this material without arousing suspicion.
Al-Qaeda looked to use fertilizer-based bombs in Operation Crevice in 2003. A
cell member bought 1200 pounds of Kemira GrowHow from a gardening store in
Great Britain. An employee at the store thought it was odd that the suspect was
purchasing that much fertilizer off-season, and the cell was compromised when
an employee at a storage facility tipped off the police. Both Oklahoma City and
