The Year (So Far) in Seizure of Materials for Homemade Explosives

One of the issues rising to the fore of security minds in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings is accessibility to materials for use in homemade bombs. As we well know, the instructions to build destructive devices are freely available on the web. The ingredients for rudimentary IEDs are also not terribly hard to procure.

With this in mind, it may be useful for analysts to track incidents where homemade bomb materials are either captured by police or reported in court as discovered during an investigation. The below timeline chronicles many of the publicly recorded incidents where HMTD, PETN, or TATP were discovered or used so far in 2013.

The incidents detailed above range geographically from California and New York to Marseille and Hyderabad. We’ve also put together a feed of mentions for those materials and explosive devices for anyone that would find monitoring such incidents useful. If you know of an incident that is missing, point us in the direction of a public resource where the incident was reported and we can add the source(s) to Recorded Future for analysis going forward.