Home Grown Terrorism in Michigan's Back Yard
What would someone be doing with 1,000 cell phones? Three Texan men with very Arabic sounding names were just arrested and charged in Michigan today with a suspicion of wanting to blow up the 5-mile-long Mackinac Bridge. The men claim that the reason they have the cell phones, over 1,000 of them, in their mini van was to sell them and make money.
That may seem innocuous enough unless you are in the know about IEDs, improvised explosive devices. The IED is a tool that terrorist just love. They are using IED's with violent results in Iraq against American troops and reaping a real harvest of death with them. The explosives being used in Iraq in car bombs and street bombs are set off by cell phones or garage door openers. IED's are a real threat and so the possession of 1,000 cell phones can simply not be taken lightly.
The men involved, Othman Awad Muhareb , Maruan Awad Muhareb, and Adham Abdelhamid Othman have said that the FBI has investigated them before, but that this time they honestly were just buying the prepaid TracFones to resell.
My question would be to whom would you be selling these phones to exactly, as Americans would simply go to a store to buy one themselves. Why buy through a street reseller? More likely is the proposition that these phones would soon be over at Pack and Ship being cartoned up to go to Pakistan for smuggling into Afghanistan and into Iraq.
That may seem innocuous enough unless you are in the know about IEDs, improvised explosive devices. The IED is a tool that terrorist just love. They are using IED's with violent results in Iraq against American troops and reaping a real harvest of death with them. The explosives being used in Iraq in car bombs and street bombs are set off by cell phones or garage door openers. IED's are a real threat and so the possession of 1,000 cell phones can simply not be taken lightly.
The men involved, Othman Awad Muhareb , Maruan Awad Muhareb, and Adham Abdelhamid Othman have said that the FBI has investigated them before, but that this time they honestly were just buying the prepaid TracFones to resell.
My question would be to whom would you be selling these phones to exactly, as Americans would simply go to a store to buy one themselves. Why buy through a street reseller? More likely is the proposition that these phones would soon be over at Pack and Ship being cartoned up to go to Pakistan for smuggling into Afghanistan and into Iraq.
Do US cell phones work in Pakistani networks?
Posted by Anonymous | Fri Aug 18, 07:39:00 AM EDT
Terrorists are not using these phones to chat to each other. They are using them to communicate with an explosive device using a radio signal. If the device was set to monitor at the frequency that was being used, it could effectively be used as a trigger.
How that is done exactly an engineer would need to say.
Posted by The Watcher | Fri Aug 18, 01:58:00 PM EDT