Last week’s arrest of a contractor entering a Swedish Nuclear facility with traces of the volatile home-made explosive Triacetone Triperoxide (TATP) should serve as a wake-up call to step up explosives detection capabilities at key facilities.
TATP is most notorious in the UK for having been used in the tube and bus bombings in July 2005, but has been a favoured improvised high explosive of militants, direct action and terrorist groups for a number of years. For example, it was used in 2001 by the infamous shoe bomber, Richard Reid, who attempted to blow up an airliner in mid-Atlantic. The ingredients are readily available and instructions on how to make the explosive are on the Net.
Despite the growing popularity of TATP, many portable explosives detection systems are still not programmed to detect the substance. As a consequence, there are many sites around the world where the deployment of explosives detection systems a) lead the target into a false sense of security, and b) inform any terrorist carrying out surveillance that he is dealing with an adversary of inferior knowledge and capability.
Two portable systems work well when deployed against TATP threats. They are the Sabre 4000 and the EVD 3500. But when specifying any explosives detection equipment, always specify the performance requirements and get the supplier’s proposal in writing, eg: “This unit will detect minute traces of TATP etc”.
Protection against Explosive Devices is covered on the Security Management Stage 1 Course, 4-15 August 2008. The workshop can be attended as a stand-alone one-day module on 7 August or as part of the 10-day course. Alternatively, the training can be carried out on site.
TATP is most notorious in the UK for having been used in the tube and bus bombings in July 2005, but has been a favoured improvised high explosive of militants, direct action and terrorist groups for a number of years. For example, it was used in 2001 by the infamous shoe bomber, Richard Reid, who attempted to blow up an airliner in mid-Atlantic. The ingredients are readily available and instructions on how to make the explosive are on the Net.
Despite the growing popularity of TATP, many portable explosives detection systems are still not programmed to detect the substance. As a consequence, there are many sites around the world where the deployment of explosives detection systems a) lead the target into a false sense of security, and b) inform any terrorist carrying out surveillance that he is dealing with an adversary of inferior knowledge and capability.
Two portable systems work well when deployed against TATP threats. They are the Sabre 4000 and the EVD 3500. But when specifying any explosives detection equipment, always specify the performance requirements and get the supplier’s proposal in writing, eg: “This unit will detect minute traces of TATP etc”.
Protection against Explosive Devices is covered on the Security Management Stage 1 Course, 4-15 August 2008. The workshop can be attended as a stand-alone one-day module on 7 August or as part of the 10-day course. Alternatively, the training can be carried out on site.
See http://www.arc-tc.com/ for details.
