Word: metallization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...packet of PETN into the crotch of his underpants, betting that if he boarded in Lagos and transferred in Amsterdam, he would make his way undetected onto the Detroit-bound flight. That worked: during his layover, Abdulmutallab most likely encountered nothing more than ID checks and a metal detector at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport. He was betting that any pat-down - unlikely as that was - would not come close to the tiny bomb in the crotch of his trousers. Fellow passenger Ghonda, who transferred to Flight 253 after a flight from Ghana, reported that although he passed through a metal...
...attention" to screening passengers for explosives, the practice remains overwhelmingly the exception and not the rule. Only about 40 millimeter-wave devices are in use, at 19 U.S. airports. Standard magnetometers, which are used at the vast majority of the more than 2,000 checkpoint lanes nationwide, can detect metal in guns and knives but are worthless against explosives like PETN...
...like most stable explosives it's not easy to ignite - it requires an initial explosion. Usually that would be accomplished with a detonator like a blasting cap, but that device would have almost surely shown up on any airport X-ray machine or metal detector. Instead, Abdulmutallab allegedly brought along a syringe, which could have been filled with a liquid explosive like nitroglycerin. If done correctly, the primer explosion could have set off the PETN, which might have blown a hole in the side of the plane. "It looked like he was trying to use a chemical initiation, and that...
...Rhythmic, deep booms came from the north like the sound of thunderous footsteps. Again the protesters were reclaiming religious practices. This time they had improvised the battle drums associated with the Ashura festival with metal trash cans, which they wheeled down the street and pounded with heavy planks of wood and lumps of concrete...
...They swung out with improvised weapons. Only one had a police baton, another wielded a long metal file he had presumably taken from a toolshed. The most impassioned of the group held a sharpened stick, which he brandished high in the air while he careened about menacingly, seemingly possessed. Later I saw one man brandishing a construction worker's shovel, still caked in dirt...