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Belgian police find evidence that the Islamic State is looking to build dirty bomb

Feb 29, 2016 6:55 pm By Robert Spencer

“Thankfully, the Obama administration said at the time that they had no evidence the material was obtained by ISIS for use in a dirty bomb and they were monitoring the situation.” Oh, that’s reassuring.

Islamic-State12

“Belgian police find evidence that ISIS is looking to build dirty bomb,” by L. Todd Wood, Washington Times, February 29, 2016:

Belgian police, while searching the home of an Islamic State or ISIS suspect after the Paris bombings last year, found surveillance films taken of a senior researcher at a Belgian nuclear center, which produces a significant portion of the world’s radioisotopes, and his family. Police suspect ISIS terrorists wanted to capture the man or his family members and hold them for ransom in exchange for nuclear materials.

“We can imagine that the terrorists might want to kidnap someone or kidnap his family,” so they can force their target to turn over the radioactive innards of such a device after removing the materials surreptitiously, said Nele Scheerlinck, a spokeswoman for Belgium’s Federal Agency for Nuclear Control, the nation’s nuclear regulator, NBC News reported.

“We know that it would not require a team of nuclear physicists or even a particularly sophisticated criminal network to turn raw material into a deadly weapon,” an internal Energy Department report on the threat, designated “Official Use Only,” declared in May 2013. “In many cases, a determined lone wolf or a disgruntled insider is all it might take.”

This incident is the first public, confirmed evidence that ISIS is attempting to acquire radioactive material to build a dirty bomb and threaten Western cities. The prospect of obtaining material in this manner is especially troubling as there are hundreds of thousands of nuclear building blocks for a bomb located around the world in medical and industrial sites. Just recently, radioactive industrial material was reported stolen in Iraq.

Thankfully, the Obama administration said at the time that they had no evidence the material was obtained by ISIS for use in a dirty bomb and they were monitoring the situation….

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Filed Under: Belgium, Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) Tagged With: Belgium’s Federal Agency for Nuclear Control


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Comments

  1. Rev g says

    Feb 29, 2016 at 6:59 pm

    I feel so much better knowing the Obama administration is monitoring things.
    This way we will be the first to know when ISIS detonates one.

    • Wellington says

      Feb 29, 2016 at 9:10 pm

      I thought you thought my scenario of a WMD, whether chemical, biological or nuclear, killing tens, if not hundreds, of thousands in a major metropolitan area in the US was simply unrealistic.

      Remember, you dismissed my hypothesis as way of buttressing Apple and dismissing my legal argument. I hope you don’t dodge things here.

      Your turn—–and please reconcile if you can, if you’re able.

      • Rev g says

        Feb 29, 2016 at 10:44 pm

        It still is unrealistic.
        You provided nothing to support your unrealistic allegation, and this doesn’t help it.
        Oh well.

        • Rev g says

          Feb 29, 2016 at 10:55 pm

          Next time, maybe do a search about dirty bombs and their lethality?

        • Phil says

          Mar 1, 2016 at 6:36 am

          Let’s remember we are all in the fight against Islamofascism, guys. The supremacist barbarians are the real foe – not each other.

          If I may put my Australian foot in the argument, I think there’s often been a confusion between true dirty bombs (or radiologically enhanced bombs) which use conventional explosive to disperse radioactive dust and Salted Nuclear Bombs (Radioisotopically Enhanced Nuclear Devices such as the legendary Cobalt Bomb) which use neutron irradiation from a true nuclear explosion to produce and disperse copious amounts of deadly, highly radioactive fallout. The former the terrorists could make, but would kill only a few people – the latter are (we hope) still just a weapon designer’s nightmare.

          The Israelis did a study on Dirty bombs in the Negev Desert between 2010 and 2014, involving 20 explosions of between 250gm to 25kg of conventional explosives (reported in 2015 in Ha’aretz). The overall risk was concluded to be minor in a statistical sense but the researchers were concerned with the ensuing panic that would arise as a consequence of the use of such weapons. It’s important to realize that terrorists will be restricted to alpha and beta particle emitters (at worst relatively weak gamma emitters) because the amount of shielding required by a powerful gamma emitter would be prohibitive if it were to be delivered by a conventional car or pickup.

          Even if the Islamist bastards were able to get their hands on a large amount of a powerful gamma emitter the total number of casualties would still be small. We have, unfortunately, a real-life case to deal with – the Goiânia Accident in September 1987 in Brazil. Two thieves stole an old radiocobalt radiotherapy source from an abandoned hospital in the city – handling by and subsequent exposure to many people resulted in the rapid death of four people including a 6-year old girl (always the innocent suffer) and the very serious radiological contamination of a further 249 (whose long-term fate in about a quarter of the cases will not be good). I’m not minimizing the threat, and I do think it will happen in some Western city (or perhaps Russian?) some time in the next decade – but it won’t be Armageddon.

      • Wellington says

        Mar 1, 2016 at 12:24 pm

        Thank you Phil and DBM for your input. Much appreciated. I’ve long wondered not about any nuclear-type WMD, though I of course don’t dismiss this, but rather a biological or chemical attack of some kind, for instance the poisoning of a major metropolitan’s area’s water supply (I seem to remember that a few years ago some Pakistanis were found wondering around a major Massachusetts Reservoir, the Quabbin I believe).

        I’m sure you’ll both agree that thinking outside the box is important here and worst-case scenarios must always be considered. There is also the matter of an EMP attack, yet something else that has to be taken into consideration even though not easily accomplished (I hope).

        • Wellington says

          Mar 1, 2016 at 1:20 pm

          That’s “wandering” and not “wondering.”

        • Wellington says

          Mar 1, 2016 at 1:24 pm

          Yes, DBM, the “panic aspect” could in many cases prove more lethal than the actual attack would. Civilization is a thin veneer and when stripped away people can devolve into a deadly mob quite rapidly.

        • Phil says

          Mar 1, 2016 at 11:31 pm

          Bioweapons are a complex subject. Infecting some Jihadist prick with a haemorrhagic virus like Ebola might work, but only if they were able to co-ordinate things very well and somehow escape detection, which is extremely unlikely – if it happens, there will have been official collusion somewhere along the line. Most likely there would be an attempt to infect the water supplies to a major city.

          Anthrax is still hard to weaponize and in the face of modern medicine is more of a propaganda weapon for terrorists than a real threat (deliberate military use of anthrax by a scientifically capable enemy is however a very worrying threat) – as for water supplies, the vegetative form of B. anthracis is deactivated by chlorine disinfection under field conditions.

          Brucelosis which causes “Malta Fever” in humans is incapacitating but the case-fatality rate is low and it can be dealt with by urban water purification.

          The traditional killers like Cholera (Vibrio cholera – used by the Japanese Army during World War II to contaminate food and water supplies of Chinese cities) and Typhus (Salmonella typhi) are killers but easily dealt with by water chlorination. I would be more worried about a related pathogen – Salmonella typhimurium (also used by Japan) causes an acute gastroenteritis with an overall case-fatality rate of approximately 4%,(especially with infants and persons older than 50 years of age). It requires UV radiation dose of 15.2 mWsec/cm2 at 253.7 nm to achieve > 99.9% inactivation which is not universally available for every municipal water supply.

          Melioidosis, caused by the bacillus Burkholderia (formerly Pseudomonas) pseudomallei is not a realistic threat – it’s inactivated by 1% sodium hypochlorite – as is the Black Death Plague organism Yersinia pestis and Chlamydia psittaci which causes Psittacosis. Given we already have Sylvian fever (a.k.a. the Plague) in squirrels in the US and the human infection risk is being easily contained the Plague is not a significant danger. Likewise properly disinfected waters provide a reliable barrier to Shigella.

          So what are the potential threats?
          i) Clostridium pefingens is common in secondary sewage effluent, the spores may potentially be weaponized and it is relatively insensitive to inactivation by chlorine – it needs rather more prolonged treatment (doable…but this requires diligent work by municipal authorities)
          ii) The rickettsial diseases, which are spread naturally primarily by biting insects with the possible exception of Q fever are not credible terrorist weapons. Coxiella burnetii causes Q fever which is incapacitating rather than lethal but it is relatively resistant to disinfection so might(?) be a possible weapon
          iii) Typhoidal tularemia is caused by the bacillus Francisella tularensis, has been weaponized, produces a nasty potentially fatal (if untreated) influenza-like illness. And chlorine (0.5-2.0 mg/L) is ineffective against tularemia.
          iv) Cryptosporidiosis is a gastrointestinal infection resulting from ingestion of the oocysts of a protozoan, Cryptosporidium parvum. The literature says it has not been weaponized (yet!), but nasty outbreaks have occurred (e.g. in Sydney) – which are incapacitating and can kill the young, the elderly and the immunocompromised. C. parvum oocysts are highly resistant to chlorine-based disinfection and to chlorine dioxide although sequential combinations of disinfectants do work and new UV light systems are being developed. Alternately expensive direct filtration can be used.
          v) Of the biotoxins, only BTX, ricin, SEB, T-2 mycotoxin, and possibly aflatoxin (maybe) could be procured in sufficient quantities to pose a threat.

          Take home message – the Islamist sods are not very technically capable and bioweapons are not that easy to deploy. But the risk is real. As DBM rightly reminds us, Russia can’t account for losses from its Biowar Program (‘Biopreparat’) and some very nasty material might (?) just be circulating around. Fortunately, much of it has a short shelf-life.

        • Wellington says

          Mar 2, 2016 at 2:45 pm

          Thank you, Phil, for your informative and detailed 11:31 P.M. post of yesterday. Interesting too is DBM’s pointing out the amount of food a grocery store has and the massive deleterious consequences that can ensue if panic sets in.

  2. Angemon says

    Feb 29, 2016 at 7:17 pm

    “In many cases, a determined lone wolf or a disgruntled insider is all it might take.”

    Yup. And we’ve seen how (in)effective Western governments are at vetting terrorists and how people effectively risk their jobs, if not their lives, by raising suspicions about any given muslim.

  3. Dan Jones says

    Feb 29, 2016 at 7:45 pm

    No way, the peace loving followers of the pedophile would NEVER do that…

    More End Time News At:
    http://www.shininginthedark.com/?page_id=6088

  4. Arthur says

    Feb 29, 2016 at 11:10 pm

    Wow, a dirty bomb would sell TV advertisements like crazy! I’d bet the news stations have their radioactivity meters, tyvek suits, and gas masks already in the news vans. The great thing is, background radiation will cause the meters to beep everywhere. So, the reporter can stand and say that “officials” report that there is no radioactivity concern and then ponder (ignorantly, of course) the beep-beep-beep on their meter on live TV! And then every reporter in every city will be out reporting radioactivity! Breaking news everywhere! Panic! Panic! Panic! but please stay tuned in over the commercial break for a message from our sponsors! Bring out the national guard! Declare a state of emergency! Tune in tonight for a special news report!

    • Jay Boo says

      Mar 1, 2016 at 11:39 am

      Katie Couric would tell us that we should compliment the Muslims who made the dirty bomb.
      Hillary would hunt for film makers.

  5. Nimrod says

    Feb 29, 2016 at 11:33 pm

    Yep, islamopandering president has all the Islamic terrorists totally under control.

    Sort of like San Bernardino.

  6. Richard Lionheart says

    Mar 1, 2016 at 4:38 am

    New dictionary entry.
    ISLAMANAUSIA; A ‘cancerous’ death cult.; Objective; The path to Armageddon..
    An evil ideology derived from a war loving murderous paedophile whose prophesy was apparently spewed by Satan himself.
    For the creation of living ‘zombies’, fodder for false martyrdom, to instil a deluded selfish belief, to murder and destroy to ‘attain’ an eternity of sexual perversion and depravity.
    ISLAMANAUSIA.
    Spread this word !!!!!

  7. Antijihadist in MX says

    Mar 1, 2016 at 6:15 am

    i HAVE NEWS FOR EVERYONE! Just yesterday, in central Mexico, in the state of Queretaro /KERE-TAH-ROW/ a Medical Device was stolen from a Lab. This medical device has an Iridium 192 Core. We know, that ISIS is procuring Ir192 for a Dirty Bomb, or many dirty bombs and wish to bring about a worldwide Nuclear Apocalypse to usher in their 12th Mahdi (Recep Taayip Erdogan?), the true Caliph of the Islamic State. Expect strategic trans-border Dirty Bomb strikes using either Cessna aircraft crossing over the US-MEX border, with drones or via rockets. At this point, all bets are off with regard to Nuclear, Biological or Chemical terrorism.

    • Phil says

      Mar 1, 2016 at 11:38 pm

      Iridium 192? It’s a beta and strong gamma emitter with a half-life of 73.83 days – that means it would have to be used within the next 370 days or so to e effective.

  8. Sam says

    Mar 1, 2016 at 8:38 am

    To his credit Obama is the biggest lier who can gather tremendous support like media in the history of human race. So that is to me really remarkable.

  9. Atheist kufar says

    Mar 1, 2016 at 9:28 am

    If a dirty bomb goes of in the US this will be reason enough for Obama to call a state of emergency and call of the elections. If the conspiracy theory is correct that Obama is seeking a third term. In my mind this is how it will happen. Like it was mention the actual risk is to people is small but with huge political consequences.

    • Rev g says

      Mar 1, 2016 at 10:29 am

      Dirty bombs are not high lethality weapons
      .
      http://survivalist101.com/dirty-bomb/

  10. cs says

    Mar 1, 2016 at 12:20 pm

    possible effects
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2708635.stm

  11. Lin says

    Mar 1, 2016 at 2:49 pm

    Once they’ve detonated their dirty bomb, I’m absolutely positive that Obama will be the very first to apologize – to the Ummah.

  12. epistemology says

    Mar 1, 2016 at 5:19 pm

    We all know that Muslims wince at nothing. There is a chance for them to abduct a scientist and blackmail the Belgians to get the nuclear material. And then good bye civilized world.

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