London, March 24: Al Qaeda is laying deadly “booby traps” by equipping its female suicide bombers with explosive breast implants that are impossible to detect at airport security checkpoints, the British intelligence agency MI5 has claimed.
“Women suicide bombers recruited by Al Qaeda are known to have had the explosives inserted in their breasts under techniques similar to breast enhancing surgery,” the Sun quoted terrorist expert Joseph Farah as saying. The lethal explosives, called PETN, are inserted inside plastic shapes during the operation, before the breast is sewn up, he added.
According to MI5, Al Qaeda doctors have been trained at some of Britain’s leading teaching hospitals before returning to their own countries to perform the surgical procedures. MI5 has also discovered that extremists are inserting the explosives into the buttocks of some male suicide bombers.
Top surgeons have confirmed the feasibility of the explosive implants. “Properly inserted the implant would be virtually impossible to detect by the usual airport scanning machines,” one surgeon said.
“You would need to subject a suspect to a sophisticated X-ray. Given that the explosive would be inserted in a sealed plastic sachet, and would be a small amount, it would make it all the more impossible to spot it with the usual body scanner,” he added.
A sachet containing as little as five ounces of PETN could blow “a considerable hole” in an aircraft’s skin, causing it to crash, experts say. —ANI