Bomb designs may link terrorists

WASHINGTON -- Government forensic investigators examining how terrorists manufacture improvised explosives have found indications of a global bombmaking network and have concluded that Islamic militant bomb builders have used the same designs for car bombs in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, government officials said last week.

"Linkages have been made in devices that have been used in different continents," said one forensic expert involved in the intelligence effort. "We know that we have the same bomb maker, or different bomb makers are using the same instructions."

The previously undisclosed intelligence operation has expanded on studies of past cases like investigations of the thwarted shoe-bomb attack aboard a Paris to Miami flight in December 2001. In a test, detonation of a similar bomb on a grounded aircraft blew a 2 foot by 2 foot hole in the fuselage -- a potentially catastrophic event aboard a pressurized plane in flight.

In another example of the investigators' work, bomb analysts have collected fragments from hundreds of improvised devices detonated in attacks in Iraq, including large car and truck bombings and smaller assaults using explosives packed in empty artillery shells and even concrete blocks. That project has led to a better understanding of the devices and to efforts to provide commanders in Iraq with faster countermeasures to help protect U.S. troops.

But there are many questions still unanswered about who is behind various bombings, including some of the major suicide bombing attacks in Iraq.

Intelligence analysts have said they believe that al-Qaida has been weakened by the campaign against terrorism and lacks a central command, as well as financial and recruiting structures.

But the bomb investigations suggest that the terrorist network may still be disseminating bomb-making skills to a generation of militants who have fanned out around the world.

Many bomb makers may have learned how to make improvised explosives in the 1990s at Osama bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan with those methods now showing up elsewhere.

Intelligence analysts did not say there was evidence of a single controlling entity behind the construction of the larger car and truck bombs often used in the most deadly attacks, although they suggested that there there might not be many people with the technical skills to build larger bombs. However, the emphasize the need to identify and locate the master bomb makers.

Some counterterrorism officials have emphasized the need to identify and locate the relatively small number of master bomb makers responsible for the most lethal bombings.

Behind the effort to analyze the bombs used in terror attacks is a new forensic intelligence unit, the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center, or TEDAC. The FBI, which took the lead in the center's creation, has found that in the last five years almost 90 percent of terrorist attacks against Americans have involved improvised explosives.

"TEDAC is a multiagency effort to analyze improvised explosive devices," said Dwight E. Adams, director of the FBI laboratory. "It gathers and shares intelligence related to the construction of these devices. Its purpose is to save lives."

The center's work has not previously been disclosed. Terrorism specialists in Congress were briefed on it last week.

While there is still debate about who is behind the bombings in Iraq, and none of the larger and most deadly attacks by suicide bombers have been solved, intelligence analysts said they believed that followers of al-Qaida or ideologically sympathetic allies might be involved in some of the bombings. But the examination of bombs used in Iraq has so far yielded little information about the identity of who made them. Many bombs of different types explode every day in the country.

Examining tiny bits of bomb housings, wirings, detonation cords, fuses, switches, the chemical composition of the explosives and the electronic signatures of remote switching devices often used to detonate bombs, experts at the center have begun to compile a data bank about terror bombs. In some cases, forensic scientists have been able to obtain evidence of who made the bomb through a fingerprint or DNA material left on an explosive part.

The new unit became operational in December after President Bush approved it, and lawmakers were told of the existence of the forensic organization in recent days, the officials said. The unit has a broad mandate to examine not only bombings against Americans, but those directed against other countries, among them Pakistan, where assassination attempts have been made against President Pervez Musharraf.

The unit, which is based at the FBI's laboratory in Quantico, Va., has drawn on experts from the Defense intelligence Agency, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and other intelligence agencies.

In countries like Iraq even sophisticated analysis has often failed to solve terrorist bombings. Investigators have collected valuable clues, including the fingerprints of the driver and license plate of the truck that carried the bomb that detonated outside the U.N. mission in Iraq last August, killing dozens of people. Even so, in a country with no fingerprint files or vehicle records, authorities still do not know who was behind the attack.

The study of the unexploded device built into the sole of the shoe worn by Richard Reid, a British citizen who was sentenced to life in prison, is a model for how the new analysis center will operate. In that case, forensic examiners were aided by experts from the Federal Aviation Administration and Transportation Security Agency.

Reid acknowledged he was a follower of al-Qaida. But subsequent forensic investigation showed that the design of his shoe bomb followed specific instructional details in training manuals found by U.S. forces at training camps in Afghanistan. The design closely followed the manuals. For example, the fuse was cut at precisely the angle the manual advised.

It remains unknown who built the shoe bomb, but investigators doubt it was Reid. Forensic analysts found a partial fingerprint on the bomb and single strand of human hair, but neither matched Reid's.

The forensic conclusions about the seriousness of Reid's shoe bomb have deepened concerns about the possibility of attacks aboard commercial airliners and provided a backdrop to the concerns that led American authorities to cancel abruptly several international flights to the United States in recent months.

Copyright C 2004 Deseret News Publishing Co.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.