How to make a homebrew liquid bomb and terrorize a nation

How to make a homebrew liquid bomb and terrorize a nation

It’s a little harder than it sounds.

From the reports in the media these are the ingredients that the British jihadist bombers were planning to create ‘murder and mayhem on an unprecedented scale’ with.

Your aim is to make triacetone triperoxide in a dried powdered form, a high explosive which can be made from 'common household chemicals' and which is 'unlikely to be caught by airport screeners'. This you will make on the plane while in the toilet. The ingredients you will need:

Adequately concentrated hydrogen peroxide. You will have to concerntrate this yourself, which is difficult. Better get a trained chemist to do it for you. Doing it yourself is risky.

Acetone and sulfuric acid.

Add vegetable dye to some of these (very unstable) ingredients and put in drinks bottles such as Powerade energy drink.

Remember to pack in your hand luggage several frozen gel-packs, preferably in a Styrofoam chiller (hydrogen peroxide must be kept near freezing point otherwise it ain’t gonna work), a thermometer, a large beaker, a stirring rod, and a medicine dropper.

Get on plane and slip into small toilet.

The Register mercilessly tells us how to do the rest:

‘Once your kit is in place, put a beaker containing the peroxide / acetone mixture into the ice water bath [from the first class Champagne bucket of course], and start adding the acid, drop by drop, while stirring constantly. Watch the reaction temperature carefully. The mixture will heat, and if it gets too hot, you'll end up with a weak explosive. In fact, if it gets really hot, you'll get a premature explosion possibly sufficient to kill you, but probably no one else.

After a few hours - assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven't overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities - you'll have a quantity of TATP with which to carry out your mission. Now all you need to do is dry it for an hour or two.

You see – it’s easy to be a jihadist, nihilist suicide bomber. You just need some very tricky ingredients, a virtual laboratory in your hand luggage and half a day or more left alone in the airplane toilet.