Message #229610

[Kristin Moore]

 The same year, four people were killed and 65 wounded in the bombing by Puerto Rican separatists of the historic Fraunces Tavern in Lower Manhattan. Even the most recent close call, the arrest in 1988 of a suspected Japanese Red Army member carrying explosives on the New Jersey Turnpike, was believed to have thwarted, not a car bombing, but a more conventional attack.

But as the 1983 assault on a United States Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 suggests, the addition of a vehicle to any bombing plot can multiply its destructive power.

Experts say terrorists were initially attracted to car bombs because they could haul heavy loads. Without access to sophisticated explosives, Irish Republican Army terrorists found that an car could carry enough nitrate fertilizer mixed with diesel fuel to create a blast that no hand-delivered explosive could match.

But the experts say the development of potent plastic explosives has added to the threat posed by terrorists, permitting them to pack far more destructive power into a much smaller space. While rarely known to have been used in a car bomb, so-called plastique explosives can explode at a velocity of 23,000 feet per second, many times the rate of ordinary dynamine.

At the same time, terrorists have learned that the seemingly benign shell of a vehicle can allow them to conceal explosives in particularly effective settings. If the aim of whoever planned today's bombing was to create maximum impact, the experts say, the apparent use of the World Trade Center parking garage for a platform is a reminder of the deadly access a vehicle can bring.

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/27/nyregion/explosion-twin-towers-car-bombs-tool-foreign-terror-little-known-us.html?ref=worldtradecenternyc