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Fireball nail bombs that could be triggered by mobile phones
Justin Davenport, Crime Correspondent16.12.08
THE car bombs left in the West End were designed to create a giant fireball and eject shards of metal and nails at great speed.
They were based on car bombs which had proved deadly in the hands of insurgents in Iraq. Bilal Abdulla and Kafeel Ahmed had viewed YouTube video clips of gas canisters exploding, including one film entitled "very cool propane bomb".
Hidden under duvets in the car passenger footwells were two 13kg gas tanks surrounded by hundreds of assorted nails. Inside the boot were 10 or 25-litre containers filled with petrol. Fuel had also been splashed around the passenger compartment of the car.
To detonate the bombs, Ahmed had built home-made initiators, which were linked via an electrical circuit to the buzzer unit of a mobile phone.
If the phone received a call it would complete the circuit and send current to the detonator - a light bulb filament surrounded by broken match heads and packed inside a syringe.
The filament was supposed to ignite the match heads and the petrol, causing the gas canisters to explode.
The nails scattered inside the car would have increased the risk of death and injury to passers-by in the immediate vicinity.
Shrapnel could have been blasted up to half a mile from the scene. The terrorists chose Mercedes cars to carry the devices because the marque is often used by illegal taxi drivers and it was thought they would not arouse suspicion in central London.
Ironically, one of the bombs failed because of the efficiency of the Mercedes boot.
The airtight seal meant there was not enough oxygen to allow an explosion.
Experts said some detonators did not work because of a faulty wire.
