07.18.16
Let’s hope that’s what they think…
From the Daily Heil, covering “Patrick Calvar, head of the General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI) – France’s equivalent of MI5:”
[Calvar] said he feared a move towards car bombs and more conventional explosive devices, allowing terrorists to attack without risking their own lives, and that he believed Islamist extremists will look to use booby-trapped cars in the future.
He said: ‘I’m convinced they’ll go to booby-trapped vehicles and bombs, thus upping their power.
‘We know very well they’re going to use this mode of operating.
‘They’re going to end up sending commandos whose mission is to organise terrorist campaigns without necessarily going to the assault with death awaiting them.’
He also raised the possibility of extremists using ‘dirty bombs’ and the natural poison ricin, saying several radical groups had studied the toxin in the past.
The Armed Islamic Group, which caused terror in Algeria in the early 1990s, was looking to put the substance on car door handles to create a panic effect, Mr Calvar said, and this tactic was also studied in northern Iraq and in the remote Pankisi Valley in Georgia, once a stronghold of Chechen militants.
Ricin on door handles. No. Too big a molecule, a protein made of two subunits, to pass through skin. Can’t happen.
On the other hand, you can cause a panic if enough people actually believe it does. Which this article is not helping with, particularly.
In any case, if terrorists actually are still entertaining the idea that ricin can be used as a contact poison, it shows they haven’t progressed on the subject in the last fifteen years.
The Wood Green poison plot was also said to have toyed with the idea of mass contact poisoning. A Nivea skin creme pot was found with a liquid extract of tobacco mixed in with it. The idea, one presumes, similar to a nicotine skin patch.
As to ricin, only 20some castor seeds were found, all but one in a jewelry tin.
anon said,
July 20, 2016 at 2:18 pm
The first rule of working for a government agency is to preserve the “need” for that agency to continue existing. I think they do this overestimating a threat because they don’t want to be bothered with actually teaching people the factual science about whatever given “terrifying” substance is popular right now.
However, I do see the logic of putting tobacco extract into skin cream, from the stance of the manufacturer. “My wrinkles are still kind of there, but I can’t seem to quit buying this cream! It’s a compulsion!”
George Smith said,
July 21, 2016 at 8:38 pm
Hah.
It’s too complicated to teach the real science to local/regional/national general incident responders. So everything must be treated as a potential disaster, which is where we are, despite the complete lack of statistics to back up the magnitude of response.