Bomb?
Too obvious.
I came to say blast but someone beat me to it.
But they are, at Glaswow they only managed to get severely burnt and beaten down the floor.
According to this article, ‘al-Qaeda’ puts on big shoes, red nose, takes custard pie, it does appear to be somewhat improvised.
As for “explosive,” only if it was a movie.
To summarize the article, if the device had gone off you would have got a big fireball, like a movie explosion, but no real damage unless you were standing quite close to it, then you might have got a bit hot.
Property damage and terror were probably the aim. You would only have to give the impression of a bomb (a big fireball would do that even if it didn’t cause mass casualties) to cause widespread disruption.
The thing is that even PIRA had to learn how to make bombs, and they only got more sophisticated over time. They didn’t wake up in 1968 with the capability to build the Manchester, Warrington, Deal or Hyde Park bombs it took them years of trial and error.
I’m also doubtful as to whether the police have released the full details of the workings of the bombs. I’m sure they don’t want to tell the bombmakers where they went wrong.
So whilst I think that the article makes some good points, they were very crude devices and they weren’t going to be as destructive as has been made out, it is a bit too dismissive (Lewis Page’s articles always seem to be dismissive, no matter what he’s writing about- but I think that that comes from his experiences in Bomb Disposal).
Well, I said “blaster.”
Or two…
