Dr. Frank's What's-it

Mohammad al-Ghoul, the aptly-named maniac

Mohammad al-Ghoul, the aptly-named maniac responsible for the latest Jerusalem bus bombing, was a two-time self-detonation failure before he finally managed to get his act together as a mass murderer. We know this because he said so in a suicide note. "This time," he added, "I hope I will be able to do it."

Here's another charming excerpt from the note:

How beautiful it is to make my bomb shrapnel kill the enemy. How beautiful it is to kill and to be killed - not to love death, but to struggle for life, to kill and be killed for the lives of the coming generation.

al-Ghoul had just begun a masters program in Islamic studies. Why, exactly?

UPDATE: Perhaps al-Ghoul failed at those first two suicide bombing attempts because he lacked the proper instructional video. Here's a description of a Hamas "how to build a bomb" video recently found in a terrorist house in Nablus. There are striking similarities between these instructions and the al-Ghoul bus bombing:

The tape begins with a lecture, complete with a diagram of a bus in Egged's red-and-white colors, on the best place for would-be suicide bombers to stand inside the vehicle to kill the largest number of people...

This is the area where we can get them with shrapnel," the instructor said, pointing to the bus's seating area, which he referred to as the "death zone."

He then gave a mathematical formula for spraying the shrapnel -- usually nails and bolts -- over the length of the bus to inflict the greatest damage.

al-Ghoul came from the Nablus area, and was attending university there; the bus he bombed was owned by the Egged cooperative; and al-Ghoul appears to have been entranced with shrapnel.

Posted by Dr. Frank at June 19, 2002 08:21 AM | TrackBack