UnNews:Saudi "ink-pen nuke" blows up
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| Democracy Dies with Dignity | ✪ | UnNews | ✪ | Saturday, December 21, 2024, 13:08:59 (UTC) |
| Saudi "ink-pen nuke" blows up | 
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4 November 2010
MOGADISHU, Somalia -- A Saudi Airline pilot was killed in Mogadishu while trying to take a small nuclear bomb onto a plane last Monday, officials said.
He wore a flight uniform and was carrying nothing suspicious--unlike the Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a plane last Christmas.
Mogadishu Airport, in one of the few areas actually controlled by the Somali government, recently installed Geiger counters at the jetways--the only reason the bomb was detected. “When the pilot passed the metal detector, the Geiger count went off the scale,” said a spokesman. “So they searched the Captain and found that the source was a pen in his shirt pocket.”
Tragically, the jetway screener, apparently fidgeting, pressed the pen's pushbutton. This was the detonator and the resulting atomic blast evaporated the screener, the Captain, this reporter, and everyone and everything else in a one-mile radius. The African Union peacekeeping force, which helps the Somali government with airport security, was also vaporized.
“Fortunately, the blast happened in Somalia,” said a spokesperson for Saudi Airlines, Abdul bin Salem. “It would have been a real loss if it went off in Saudi Arabia.” The plane, you see, was due to fly to the northern Saudi city of Jeddah, then to Dubai.
The device, now dubbed the “ink-pen nuke” by the media, is the smallest thermonuclear bomb ever recorded, with an estimated one ounce of plutonium, and authorities say such technology could only have come from the Apple Computer factory in China.
Red-handed
This is the first time that an attempt to blow up a commercial flight going to Saudi Arabia has been successful, not to mention the entire area; and the first time an atomic bomb has been detonated in a conflict since Nagasaki and Hiroshima were destroyed at the end of WWII.
Regarding the pilot, "We don't know whether he's linked with al-Qaeda, but his were the acts of a terrorist. They caught him red-handed," police spokesman Abdullah Hessian Barise said. “Literally.”
U.S. officials are investigating any links to a similar attempt in Warsaw in 1932. But they did not concede that the pilot was a terrorist. "He may have been a 'lone wolf,'" said one.
Somalia, mostly controlled by Islamic radicals, has not had an effective national government for almost 20 years. And now they have no airport, either.
Sources[edit]
- Staff "Somali man 'tried to take bomb onto plane'". BBC, November 4, 2010