Terrorists: More Sophisticated Tools of the Trade

The following is from Debka. As an editor from the Jane's defense and intelligence publishing house recently said to me, some of Debka's material is plain fantasy, some of it is spot on true, and some of it is grounded in fact but has some imagination attached for good measure. The dispatch below is totally believable and points out how ingenious and difficult a foe we face and how unrelenting this war is -- withdrawing from Iraq alone is not going to make it go away (though that is something we have to do -- I will continue that article later this week when I have time).

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DEBKAfile Exclusive: Al Qaeda’s novel death technique: Detonating hundreds of simultaneous explosions through cell phone and Internet

September 27, 2006, 1:46 PM (GMT+02:00)

DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources report extreme concern among security services in the United States, Europe, the Far East and Israel, after the source of 350 multiple attacks in Bangladesh on Aug. 17, 2005, was traced to Tripoli, Lebanon

French counter-terror experts leading an international inquiry into the attacks discovered that a facility, set up there by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, al Qaeda’s late Iraq commander, had developed the new design which works through Internet messengers like Skype or MSN.

Network-connected mobile phones can remotely detonate over the Internet simultaneous explosions hundreds of miles apart, anywhere on the world. US forces located and killed Zarqawi on June 7, 2006.

This system, seen only in Bangladesh so far, is more complex than any used by al Qaeda before. A year ago, some 350 explosions in quick succession in 36 districts hit government facilities and hotels in Dhaka and 16 other Bangladeshi towns. One person was killed and 115 people injured.

The French team was led to Tripoli by a tip-off that al Qaeda operative Kaci Warab, seen at Bangladesh’s international Zia airport shortly after the multiple blasts and followed since, had turned up in the north Lebanese city. The materials found at the al Qaeda lab there were removed to forensic facilities in Paris and produced the following picture:

For its Bangladesh operation, al Qaeda had prepared 350 cell phones. Communications software was installed in each, together with a simple interface program designed in the Tripoli lab. Loaded onto the master computer in Tripoli linked to global Internet was the readily available Skype or MSN software. The cell phones were given 350 different usernames – or rather the same one with a different numeral, e.g. Tom1, Tom2, and so forth up to Tom350. The program was relayed to the mobile phones which then transmitted the operational signal to detonate the explosives.

The Bangladesh method would be hard to apply in the United States, Europe or Israel. Anti-terror security measures are more stringent there and would make it difficult to plant 350 hidden bombs without some being detected. On the other hand, DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources point out that setting off 20 or even 10 simultaneous explosions would have a disastrous effect if the bombs were planted, say, on express trains in different countries. So far, this has not happened, but it is possible that Al Qaeda’s hi-tech experts are working on improvements to the system, such as adapting it to satellite phones.