First obtain the raw ingredients. Where possible, always shop in supermarkets to avoid the staff remembering your visit. An ideal base liquid is nitromethane. This is used to propel the engine of a model aircraft. It should be mixed with a suitable sensitizing chemical. Gloves must be worn at all times when mixing the chemicals so as to avoid generating heat which could produce a premature explosion. The mixing should also be done in a cool room. The final result will be a crystalline white powder. The technical name for this is triacetone triperoxide. The powder can be suitably concealed in containers in common use.
Sidney Alford, chairman of Alford Technologies, a leading British explosives company, said (to the author): “Everyone in the business knows that nitromethane is an explosive, but many people, including some in the police and security services, have yet to cotton on to that.” And in Tel Aviv, Ehud Keinan, a world-ranking authority on liquid explosives whose expertise was prized by Mossad, confirmed that the details discovered on the al-Qaeda DVD were “of major importance in the fight against terrorism. It is very easy to produce such explosives once the know-how is explained. The raw materials are readily available in unlimited quantities on any main street.”
Meir Dagan learned the DVD was discovered during the climax of an MI5 surveillance operation that had begun in Dublin, Ireland, and ended on the road to Chester in the north of England when intelligence officers swooped on a 2000-reg Lancia, which had come from Dublin on the car ferry to Holyhead in North Wales. At the wheel of the vehicle was a middle-aged English woman who had driven to the Welsh port from the Midlands. Beside her sat an Algerian-born man, also middle-aged, who has lived in a fashionable Dublin suburb. Both have been under surveillance as part of Operation Overt, which led to the arrests of twenty-four terrorists in March 2007. The couple and their car were driven to an MI5 safe house near London. Waiting were senior interrogation officers. While they questioned the couple in separate rooms, MI5 forensic experts conducted a search of the car. It was then that the DVD was found.
Dagan also learned that MI5 officers had reopened the case of another Algerian terrorist who had lived for four years in Lucan, another Dublin suburb. In December 2005 he was convicted under the name of Abbas Boutrab for conspiracy to blow up aircraft and sentenced to six years at Belfast Crown Court. However, it subsequently emerged that Boutrab was not his real name—but one of nine different aliases on passports found in an al-Qaeda safe house in Ireland.
The Republic had increasingly become a concern for Mossad since it had emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 that al-Qaeda had infiltrated the thriving Muslim community in Dublin. Ireland’s small security service had gratefully accepted help from Mossad, MI5, and European intelligence services to mount various surveillance operations and GCHQ, Britain’s “spy in the sky” had monitored the e-mails and phone calls of suspects. One result had been to thwart the plan of Abu Hamsa, the radical cleric, to seek political asylum in Ireland before he could be arrested on an extradition warrant to face terrorist-related charges in the United States. Hamsa was now in Belmarsh, one of Britain’s high-security prisons, serving a sentence for his involvement in terrorism. Hamsa believed, wrongly, that the long history of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Féin, in successfully opposing extradition from the United States of IRA suspects to face trial in Northern Ireland would ensure he would not be extradited to America. He was counting on the Dublin government facing legal problems; like other European countries, Ireland has strict laws about extradition. In 2008, the Irish government had still refused to return the three Continuity IRA members to Colombia. They continue to live quite close to the Irish border with Northern Ireland.
