Al-Qaida once used its online magazine, “Inspire,” to recommend bomb-makers use “pressurized cookers” to help construct homemade bombs suited for “crowded areas.”
On Tuesday, The Drudge Report resurfaced a 2010 CNN article revealing al-Qaida’s recommendations for would-be terrorists.
An idea in the first edition, “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom,” is touched on again.
“The pressurized cooker should be placed in crowded areas and left to blow up. More than one of these could be planted to explode at the same time. However, keep in mind that the range of the shrapnel in this operation is short range so the pressurized cooker or pipe should be placed close to the intended targets and should not be concealed from them by barriers such as walls.”
The magazine is tailored to instruct lone actors on how to become terrorists.
A pressure-cooker bomb appears to have been used in Monday’s attack on the Boston Marathon. But whether Inspire magazine could have actually inspired Monday’s double bombing remains to be seen, with authorities still hunting for suspects and a motive.
The Washington Post’s Max Fisher warned against reading too much into the al-Qaida/pressure-cooker bomb connection Tuesday afternoon:
And “Inspire” was far from the first extremist publication to distribute instructions for making pressure-cooker bombs. Yair Rosenberg of Tablet Magazine points out on Twitter that “The Anarchist’s Cookbook,” published in 1971, also included information on how to make them.