Body Cavity Bombers: The New Martyrs

Body Cavity Bomb

The general trend of the bomb getting closer and closer to the human body is taken to its extreme with the bomb being placed inside the human body. This placement option is conceptually derived from contraband smuggling though airports and into prisons—if illegal drugs are being carried inside the human body to escape screening and detection then internally carried explosive devices for terrorist use purposes should also conceivably be able to be carried. The second activity suggesting this placement option is the use of booby-trapped corpses in wars and insurgencies. Booby-trapping the corpses of soldiers—typically with the bomb placed under the corpse—is a well-known technique. These bombs are now being placed internally. In recent conflicts in Nepal, in 2005, a soldier’s body had an improvised explosive device placed within it (no postmortem was carried out and the bomb exploded during cremation) and, in Afghanistan in 2007, a news headline began with “Insurgents planting IEDs inside human corpses…”[63]. This bomb placement option is thus simply the merging of internal body contraband smuggling by a living human being and the placement of an explosive device in the body cavity of a dead human being utilized as a booby trap.

Of these six placement options, the body cavity bomb option is thought to be the only one that will be operationally viable in the future for terrorist utilization as a means of bomb delivery against a high value target. This is because all of the other options generate a higher level of risk of discovery during screening. Casts, prostheses, false body parts, and immense belly rolls, are all anomalies and therefore result in ‘red flags’ for screening personnel protecting high value targets. Even explosive liquid saturated clothing with fabric stiffness, discoloration, and the use of masking odors would present its own unique set of anomalies. Additionally, the explosive clothing bomb is probably not currently feasible, while the under fat roll bomb suffers from a lack of candidate personnel fulfilling the delivery criteria since very few terrorist operatives are that significantly overweight. Carrying the bomb in an internal body cavity effectively renders it invisible to security personnel and does not raise any ‘red flags’ that would single out the terrorist operative for further scrutiny. While certain operative behaviors or forms of non-visual sensing via machines or animals may still result in the detection of the body bomb, the probability of detection is significantly reduced[64]. Further, bomb construction protocols—such as the use of ‘clean rooms’ for operative cavity packing— can be implemented as a counter to screening measures that further ensure reduced probability of the body bomb being detected. These advantages make the body cavity bomb option far superior to the other competing terrorist bomb placement options analyzed.