11.06.17
Ricin round-up
Corpus Christi fire and police responded to a condominium complex in the 14200 block of Whitecap Boulevard at about 8:30 p.m. Monday.
The call was described as a mental health issue with threats of suicide, police Lt. J.C. Hooper said.
Hooper would not disclose the man’s condition on Tuesday.
Fire Capt. James Brown said the man made the mixture by extracting oil from castor beans. He did not know exactly how he made the liquid.
“He somehow constructed ricin on his own,” Brown said. “I’m not sure on the process, but he extracted oil from the beans and ingested it.”
Corpus Christi Medical Center confirmed that a patient suspected of ingesting ricin was admitted to the Bay Area Hospital.
Confusion reigns. If the young man was unable to get castor seeds, just castor oil, there was no ricin. Ricin is present only in the mash of castor seeds. Castor oil, on the other hand, has various uses in human society.
As a laxative is one.
In Derby, England, a video (which I have not seen), connected to an ongoing terrorism trial:
A factory worker contacted a man he believed was an IS commander to pledge allegiance to IS and ask for “an order”, a court has heard.
Munir Mohammed, 36, from Derby, is on trial at the Old Bailey accused of plotting a terror attack using a homemade bomb with Rowaida El-Hassan.
The jury watched a video about making nerve agent ricin that was found at his home and they were told he exchanged messages with Ms El-Hassan about it.
They deny preparing terrorist acts.
Despite one of the accused’s alleged training in pharmacy, the level of expertise was quite low. One suspect was on video purchasing the wrong ingredient for a notional bomb plot:
Asda CCTV footage shows a suspected ‘bomb maker’ buying the wrong type of nail varnish remover for ‘terror attack’ explosives, a court has heard.
Sudanese immigrant Munir Mohammed allegedly enlisted the help of a chemist he met on a dating website in his plot to make explosives or deadly ricin poison …
The court was shown footage of the defendant visiting an Asda store near his home on December 1 last year.
Prosecutor Anne Whyte QC told jurors when Mohammed was in the supermarket, he spoke on the phone to El-Hassan who sent him a link via WhatsApp to a website advertising a bottle of hydrogen peroxide,
Ms Whyte also told the court his till receipt showed he had bought a bottle of Sally Hansen acetone-free nail polish remover.
The prosecution say he saw the word “acetone” and assumed he was buying a component of TATP explosives, when in fact he had bought the wrong product.
Despite being technology enabled — the Internet, WhatsApp — obviously no remedy for fairly obvious goof-ups.
Sixteen years on, the technical knowledge required to make bombs, exotic poisons and WMDs outside of warzones and government labs remains quite low. In inverse proportion to using a rented truck or a guns as murder weapons, so to speak.