An instructor provides step-by-step lessons on how to construct pure TNT and bomb components from common household ingredients in the latest al-Qaida videotape aired by CNN.
The tape, shown on Thursday, includes instructions on manufacturing detonators and fuses, and presumably would allow terrorists to put together highly explosive devices at the site of an attack without drawing the attention of intelligence agencies, CNN said.
The broadcast is the fourth installment in a series of videotapes the network said came from a cache of 64 al-Qaida tapes taken from Afghanistan. CNN said on Tuesday that it paid $30 000 for the footage.
The videotape contains bomb-making instructions similar to those found in al-Qaida written manuals recovered from the terrorists’ hide-outs in Afghanistan, the network noted. But it said the tape is significant because it shows that the terrorist group has designed a simple and precise lesson plan – easy to follow by new recruits – for making explosives without being detected.
”The overarching point here is that they can pick any venue or target city … arrive in that city and, based on what we are seeing here, (construct a bomb) using common materials,” CNN quoted Tony Villa, a consultant for the US government on terror tactics and bomb making, as saying.
The three-hour training session was hidden inside an action movie videotape and was preceded by quotations from the Quran and a call to Muslims to ”fight in the cause of God,” an indication that it was meant to be distributed secretly to recruits in Osama Bin Laden’s forces, the network said.
The network said the clips it aired did not provide enough information for viewers to construct homemade bombs.
Bin Laden was indicted in US federal court for the August 7, 1998, bombing attacks on US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that killed 231 people, including 17 Americans, and wounded about 5 000.
Al-Qaida also been blamed for the first World Trade Centre attack in 1993, and the bombing of the warship USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.
Previous tapes aired on Monday through to Wednesday showed al-Qaida operatives conducting poisonous gas experiments on dogs, bin Laden warning of a mission that would ”result in killing Americans and getting rid of them,” and al-Qaida recruits training in terror tactics at a remote camp in eastern Afghanistan.
US officials said footage from the first tape showing the poison gas experiments did not reveal any unexpected capabilities by the group accused of carrying out the September 11 attacks. – Sapa-AP