From Terror to Theft, Pipe Bombs Find Sinister Function

Popular for decades among Middle Eastern terrorists, pipe bombs in recent years have been used in this country by some militia groups, white supremacists and activists with a grudge against the federal establishment. Even bank robbers have used them.

Considered to be low-tech devices, they are cheap and easy to assemble. Law enforcement officials and anti-terrorism experts have become alarmed by the growing availability of manuals on how to construct them. Many public libraries have instruction books, and the Internet has several World Wide Web sites on bomb-making.

Crude, homemade pipe bombs, like the one that blew up Saturday in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, can produce a lethal hail of shrapnel. Authorities said the device in Atlanta consisted of three 10-inch lengths of galvanized pipe packed with explosives and packaged in a knapsack with batches of nails and screws.

When the pipe is capped at both ends and a timing device is attached, the bomb can detonate like a hand grenade, launching metal fragments hundreds of feet in all directions with bullet-like force.

Palestinian guerrillas opposed to the Middle East peace process have used pipe bombs in their terror campaign against Israel, and, more recently, some extremists who fear that newly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may abandon the principle of trading land for peace have resorted to the same devices.

The Irish Republican Army has employed the simple terror weapon in public places in London and in that city’s subway system.

Richard Hrain Dekmejian, a terrorism expert at USC, said recently that he believes troubled youths are among those in this country who have been experimenting with the deadly technology.

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The Internet is providing dangerous but appealing data to such people, Dekmejian noted. “This is a new epidemic, and I see the problem getting worse,” he said.

A pipe bomb’s power depends on its size and the quantity and strength of the explosives inside, according to authorities.

Referring to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, in which six people were killed and more than 1,000 injured, Larry Cornelison of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said: “The explosive device used was nothing more than a very large car bomb, which is nothing more than a very large pipe bomb. But most people don’t make pipe bombs that they need a truck to carry.”

ATF, which is charged with investigating offenses related to firearms and explosives, says that pipe bombs have become the most common explosive devices used by criminals in the United States.

In Spokane, Wash., two men wearing ski masks used a pipe bomb to rob a bank last April, heavily damaging the building and terrorizing the bank’s employees and customers. More commonly, however, pipe bombs in the United States are associated with hate crimes or anti-government protests.

A federal judge in Southern California meted out stiff prison terms in 1994 to leaders of the Fourth Reich Skinheads for using pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails against synagogues and a number of residences. An FBI agent who infiltrated the group said that skinheads hoped their attacks would spark racial conflict.

Earlier this year, suspected Unabomber Theodore J. Kaczynski, a Harvard-educated mathematician, was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges that he mailed sometimes-fatal homemade pipe bombs to random victims over a 17-year period. He has pleaded innocent.

Three months before the Olympics, federal agents arrested two members of a small militia group in rural Georgia on charges that they planned to build and distribute pipe bombs. But despite the group’s proximity to Atlanta, no evidence has surfaced linking them to Saturday’s blast or to any previous plans to disrupt the Games, officials said.