Word: metallism
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...parking level, shining flashlights on the mangled remains of cars and trucks that had been blown to bits. "Hey, look at this," said an agent from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Joseph Hanlin, a bomb expert from ATF, picked up a thin, charred, twisted bit of metal about 18 in. long. "This is something that we need to take...
That piece of metal led investigators across the Hudson River, to a Jersey City mosque of Islamic fundamentalists where a frequent guest was a blind preacher who had long advocated holy war. In a nearby apartment agents found electronics manuals and wiring and other bomb-making material. By week's end authorities had two men in custody. One, Ibrahim A. Elgabrowny, had dunked his hands into a toilet to foil any testing for traces of explosives, a prosecutor charged at his arraignment. The other, Mohammed A. Salameh, an illegal immigrant from Jordan, had rented the van that apparently carried...
...produce it could not have been crammed into an ordinary car. So the investigators were looking for pieces of a van or truck so badly burned and twisted as to indicate that they had come from a vehicle at or near the center of the blast. The piece of metal they found looked just that heavily damaged, and the trained eyes of the probers recognized it as part of the frame...
...debris was scattered for miles. Investigators in that case drew a life-size diagram of the plane on a warehouse floor, then set about reconstructing it piece by piece like a jigsaw puzzle. From that they could determine where in the plane's body the blast occurred, because "the metal would be bent to follow the contours of the vectors of the explosion," says Phillips...
Experts will also try to determine the velocity of the shock waves emanating from the blast. "Different compounds explode at different speeds," says Brian Jenkins, senior managing director for Kroll Associates, an international investigating firm. "You can tell by examining the metal that was torn apart. Was it a big explosion that moved a lot of things, or was it a high-velocity explosion that rent metal?" Sophisticated plastic explosives tend to shred metal and pulverize concrete, while common substances like dynamite tend to knock walls over and push vehicles around. Once investigators identify the substance, they will...