Slashdot Mirror
Liquid Terror Charges Dropped
A Pakistani judge has decided to drop terrorism charges against the man described as a "key figure" in the alleged plan to blow up flights out of London using liquid explosives. Instead of facing charges of terrorism for the plot, which forced many travelers to follow strict guidelines with respect to liquids, Rashid Raud now faces charges such as forgery. From the article: "Several commentators said the threat was deliberately exaggerated to bolster the anti-terror credentials of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and that it helped to demonise British Muslims of Pakistani origin. The Crown Prosecution Service in the UK said the dropping of charges against Mr Rauf in Pakistan would "make no difference" to the case against the men charged in Britain."
The videos were from Brainiac, and if you look carefully in the slow motion of the first bathtub they blow up, you can see the wire that leads over the size to the charge they set off. I've worked with cesium and rubidium, and they're not too much stronger than potassium- not enough that such a small amount would blow it up, anyway. Simply put, they fudged it with a small charge to wow the audience. Some great science going on there.
As for the "new terrorist binary explosive" video, that's simply a small demo charge in the post used to support the melon. The shower of sparks pretty much gives it away. No tiny amount of chemical exposives can cause that much damage. Moreover, if it were that strong, the author whipped up a massive batch of the stuff (in relative terms)- an explosive sufficiently sensitive to shock initiation that mixing it the wrong way would have killed him, when he could have made a much smaller batch. It's just silliness. It also seems the sky is a bit darker after the "explosion," as if the melon were removed and a small pyro charge was set off and spliced in there. The quantity of explosives used is far too small, even for the most powerful of primary explosives.
Disclaimer: I am, in fact, an explosives chemist with extensive experience with primary, secondary, and blasting explosives, including terrorist "improvised" explosives and devices.