Raw Story Casts New Doubt on Airline "Terror Plot"

Citing a retired British Army expert, Raw Story has published an independent investigation that casts new doubts on the supposed plot to down airliners with liquid explosives.

"The idea that these people could sit in the plane toilet and simply mix together these normal household fluids to create a high explosive capable of blowing up the entire aircraft is untenable," said Lt. Col. [Nigel] Wylde, who was trained as an ammunition technical officer responsible for terrorist bomb disposal at the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Sandhurst.

After working as a bomb defuser in Northern Ireland, Lt. Col. Wylde became a senior officer in British Army Intelligence in 1977. During the Cold War, he collected intelligence as part of an undercover East German "liaison unit," then went on to work in the Ministry of Defense to review its communications systems.

Wylde said the process of creating the explosives would require 12 to 36 hours, and distillation of the liquids to obtain the required purity. If there was a conspiracy, he said, "it did not involve manufacturing the explosives in the loo," adding that "the planned attack would be detected long before the queues outside the loo had grown to enormous lengths."

The article was written for Raw Story by Nafeez Ahmed, who teaches International Relations at the University of Sussex, Brighton, and who testified before the U.S. Congress about his research on international terrorism last year.

Wylde's suspicions about the "terror plot" follow in the wake of a Daily Mail article, published on August 19, which alleged the Pakistan government had found no evidence at all against the "mastermind" of the plot and that it "may not have been as serious, or as far advanced, as the authorities initially claimed."