Defection

An interesting little story from AFP, about ‘Hameed’, a 25-year-old Afghan ‘reformed’ suicide bomber. He was apparently recruited by his uncle, a member of the Taliban, and was trained to assassinate the Chief of Police in Wardak province. The details of the training he received are pretty familiar. He was sent to a madrassa near Peshawar and

“soon after I arrived that I was told for the first time that I was going to be trained for a suicide bombing mission. I was assigned to attack the Wardak police chief, General Abdul Yameen Muzafaruddin”. He and about 15 other Afghans were trained in how to put on suicide vests, how to choose the target and how to stay calm.

But Hameen had a change of heart and decided not to become a bomber, contacted his other uncle who was a police commander (family get-togethers must be interesting) who extracted him and presented Hameen to his intended target. Hameen recited the plan and handed over his explosives vest.

The former bomber is now a police officer working for the man he was trained to assassinate. Quite the turnaround, but I’d not like to be sitting next to him in the patrol car. This is the first instance I’ve come across of a failed suicide attacker being turned in such a way – if anyone has other examples I’d be very interested to hear about them.

Attacks in Pakistan, Iraq

Following on from yesterday’s assaults in Lahore and Kohat, there was another suicide VBIED attack on a police investigation agency building in Peshawar. Eleven were killed and 15 injured, including three police officers.

Initially it was reported that the attacker might have been a woman on a motorcycle.  However, police have apparently now retracted this claim and think the woman may have been an innocent bystander.

Police now believe a woman seen near the scene on a motorcycle was an innocent victim and had been a passenger on a motorcycle travelling behind the car bomb, reports the BBC’s Aleem Maqbool in Islamabad.

This would have been significant as it is virtually unheard of for women to mount suicide attacks in the region. The only such case I am aware of was in December 2007 when a woman tried to attack a military checkpoint in Peshawar.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, there was an attack in Tal Afar, near Mosul. A bomber detonated himself in a Sunni mosque. Apparently the atacker first shot the mosque’s imam and then blew himself up, killing eight and wounding 30. I suspect this will turn out to be another AQ in Iraq hit on someone who was opposing them locally. There appears to be a tendency for these attacks to occur during Friday prayers – presumably because it represents a fixed point in time and space when they can be sure the target will be present. I wonder if there is a religious element also?

Gut wrenching

The British Media has a phenomenon called ‘Silly Season’, when, because there is very little of substance happening (usually in August when all the political types are on their holidays) the papers are filled with even greater volumes of nonsense than usual.

In this vein, I spotted this story from the Sunday edition of The Scotsman, entitled Al-Qaeda killers hide bombs in stomachs which claims:

TERRORISTS may be planning a new wave of suicide bomb attacks using explosives hidden in their internal organs, it has been claimed. The alarm was triggered last month after an al-Qaeda militant, with a bomb planted in his intestine, attempted to assassinate a Saudi prince

This story has generated a lot of headlines to date, but this is the most outlandish I have seen yet. In his intestine? This is despite reports from Saudi that the guy in fact had concealed a small quantity of explosive in his underwear, relying on Saudi mores to ensure he would not be searched.

I always remember something Brian Jenkins said about terrorist ‘background chatter’. He said that a lot of the time the media comes up with outlandish stories about potential threats or modes of attack that the jihadist discussion groups pick up on and ask each other ‘Could we/Should we do this?’ and then the various intelligence agencies pick up on this and feed it into media reporting, in effect creating an echo or feedback loop.

I wonder where the bomb will have been located next? It appears to be reversing up the digestive tract. That he may have hidden the device up his backside sounds plausible, but in his intestine?

Update: As this story points out, even if doable, an internally smuggled bomb is probably not the most effective weapon:

“It sounds almost like drunk logic, where an idea sounds great until the next morning and you’re sober, going, ‘Noooo, that won’t work,'” said Paul Worsey, a Missouri University of Science and Technology researcher and inventor of explosives. “Unless you’re actually hugging somebody, nobody’s going to get badly hurt…The force of such an explosion would be in the direction of the easiest exit..The rest of the body would work like a sandbag against the blast … though it would be a mess.”

Sensible stuff.

New details of LTTE attack planning

General Fonseka

One of the interesting side effects of the defeat of the LTTE by the Sri Lankan military has been a spate of new information regarding previous incidents. Presumably the Sri Lankan intelligence services have had a field day, interrogating captured Tigers and poring over seized document caches.

A good example concerns the April 2006 attempted suicide assassination bid against the head of Sri Lanka’s army, Sarath Fonseka. He was seriously injured when a female LTTE Black Tiger ( 21-year-old Anoja Kugenthirasah) detonated herself inside the perimeter of the headquarters of the Sri Lankan military. At the time, the attack drew a lot of attention, partly because of the apparent security breach, partly because the bomber may have used being pregnant as a cover for getting into the base (by attending a clinic held at the site’s hospital).

A backside-borne IED?

In late August, a known al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula militant attempted to assassinate the Saudi head of counter-terrorism, Assistant Minster of Interior for Security Affairs, Prince Mohammed Bin Naif. The attacker, Abdullah Bin Hassan Bin Taleh Asiri (23), was supposed to be surrendering himself to the Saudi authorities. He was transported from the southern border region to Jeddah on a Saudi private jet. Upon meeting the Prince and during discussions regarding the surrender of other militants, Asiri detonated his device.

There are two curious aspects to this incident: first, how did Asiri manage to get a device on an aircraft and then into proximity to the target; second, why was he the only casualty? Both questions might be answered by reports that he had secreted the explosives internally (to be specific, in his anus). This is the first time I have heard of a suicide attacker seeking to conceal a device in such a way. Presumably the combination of the necessarily small quantities of explosive (and I’m guessing not much in the way of shrapnel), combined with the fact the attacker’s body must have absorbed a large amount of the device’s energy is what saved the PRince from more than minor injuries.

An interesting example of an innovative but not entirely successful variation of the suicide attack. I wonder if an airport security scanner would be able to pick up such a device?