Posted on 03/01/2006 8:01:51 AM PST by cashion
NORMAN - A Norman police bomb expert said Tuesday he does not believe University of Oklahoma student Joel Henry Hinrichs III committed suicide by blowing himself up outside a packed football stadium.
"I believe he accidentally blew himself up," Sgt. George Mauldin said.
Mauldin said Hinrichs, 21, an engineering student, had two to three pounds of triacetone triperoxide, commonly known as TATP, in a backpack in his lap when it exploded Oct. 1.
When asked if he believed Hinrichs meant to enter the stadium with the explosives, Mauldin replied, "I don't believe he intended for an explosion to occur at that spot (on the park bench)."
"Some of us will forever wonder what he (Hinrichs) was doing at that time, at that place," Police Chief Phil Cotten said.
Hinrichs was sitting on a park bench 173 yards from the OU stadium during the second quarter of OU's night game against Kansas State when the TATP inside his backpack detonated.
"Someone saw him fiddling with it (the backpack) shortly before the explosion occurred. I think he got cocky, and it went off," Mauldin said.
Mauldin and Cotten briefed Norman City Council members about the explosion and their agency's investigation in a conference before Tuesday night's council meeting.
The FBI has said in the past its investigation did not uncover any links between the student and terrorist organizations. They have said they may never know whether the student wanted to get inside the stadium.
The student's father, Joel Hinrichs Jr., has said his son intended to kill only himself.
Mauldin, head of the Norman bomb unit, said investigators detonated at the scene the remains of Hinrichs' backpack, which contained wires, a battery and a circuit board.
Graphic photos of Hinrichs' headless body still upright on the park bench next to a tattered backpack were shown to the council.
Mauldin said investigators found "quite a bit more" explosive material inside Hinrichs' Parkview apartment on Sooner Drive, southeast of Lindsey Street and Stinson Drive.
A pint-size Tupperware container on a counter was filled with TATP Hinrichs had manufactured, Mauldin said.
A pill bottle packed with TATP with a fuse stuck in it was found behind a computer, he said.
The FBI reported in November that 0.4 pound of TATP was found inside Hinrichs' apartment. TATP is the most unstable explosive known and is "the explosive of choice" in the Middle East, Mauldin said. "It is so volatile, even a small amount on the tip of a finger will explode if it comes within 8 inches of a match," Mauldin said.
Investigators also found a quantity of acetone and hydrogen, components necessary for manufacturing TATP, inside the student's apartment.
"We found evidence of him compressing TATP, which is foolhardy, given its properties," Mauldin said.
Making TATP is a seven-step process, Mauldin said, with the substance becoming explosive after three steps.
Bomb squad officers used great care in removing the material from Hinrichs' apartment for fear it would explode, Mauldin said.
"And we wanted to get it out of there quickly. The longer TATP sits, the more likely (it is) to explode spontaneously," he said.
Officers also removed "a lot" of military rounds, many of them live, and pieces of metal from the student's apartment, Mauldin said.
Metal fragments often are added to explosives to make them more deadly, he said.
The explosives Hinrichs had outside the stadium were pure, with no fragmentation added, Mauldin said.
However, he said, the student kept careful notes of experimentation with explosives in the weeks leading up to the Oct. 1 blast.
Notes indicated Hinrichs experimented with adding fragmentation to explosives as if "he were trying to make a damaging product," Mauldin said.
Most of Hinrichs' experiments occurred at Red Rock Canyon, according to the notes.
"Some of us will forever wonder what he (Hinrichs) was doing at that time, at that place," Police George Mauldin said.
Boy! Talk about Clintonspeak! (Esp. Compare the second statement with, "We'll never know what drew him away from us.")
I hope you Sooners find a way to remove these guys from their positions on the police force. Please make it Former Sgt George Mauldin and Former Chief Phil Cotten. These guys are clearly a threat to public safety.
ML/NJ
They haven't finished writing it yet.
Boomer Sooner? LOL
It all sounds reasonable to me:
Guy's going to kill himself, so he packs explosives into a backpack and proceeds to walk toward a crowded football stadium.
Oops. Kaboom.
Is this the same FBI that threatened a career FBI agent in Phoenix who was trying to warn them that something bad involving flying airplanes might be about to happen?
Notice how they danced around the inevitable conclusion: that he wanted the bomb to blow up with people other than just himself as victims
The Pakistani roommate, the ticket to Libya, all the explosives in the apartment.
Nah, nothing to see here. Move along.
So it wasn't suicide? So exactly what were his intentions? This stinks.
Added keyword: WORKACCIDENT
The guy got influenced by his Islamic friends.
He was probably depressed and had found one sure cure.
He built a bomb, intended to blow it up in the stadium so that he'd
not be the only one with a really rotten day.
But he screwed the pooch and the thing exploded prematurely.
Hence, it was just a work accident for a unhappy terrorist with Islamic ties.
That's not true at all. No evidence or proof of any Islamic connections, not even for the Paki roommate to whom he barely spoke.
It's possible that the pic is online somewhere. There was an eyewitness account written shortly thereafter by someone who saw THE VIDEO CAPTURE (not the body itself) of that scenario (headless torso, part of one arm gone - he was leaning over holding it in his lap and looking at it) on a LE remote night vision camera monitor.
The Paki roomie didn't have any plane tickets.
The only plane ticket mentioned was one that a visiting professor from Algeria had in the apartment where the roomie was found partying that evening. It was his plane ticket home and he was already packed to leave the next morning.
No, he didn't have a game ticket. They found his wallet and the contents of his backpack and no ticket. No one sold him one and no one reported scalping one to him.
If he had one, it would have been in the hand that was blown to smithereens, but even then, I think the forensics team could've detected the pasteboard remnants.
OU game tickets are fought over in property settlements and custody disputes.
Here's the OU Daily story:
http://www.oudaily.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/02/28/440535120debd
Details of Hinrichs case revealed
Norman police officer said he thought Hinrichs’ explosion was meant for different time, place
by Grant Slater
February 28, 2006
A presentation by Norman law enforcement officials Tuesday revealed grim and candid details about the investigation into the death of Joel Henry Hinrichs III on Oct. 1, 2005.
Norman Police Sgt. George Mauldin said he felt Hinrichs had intended his explosives for another time and place and also that police initially suspected Hinrichs might be linked to Islamic fundamentalist groups working in America.
The suspicions of an Islamic connection were shown to be false, Mauldin said.
Hinrichs was killed in a blast by an explosive device of his own design and preparation, Mauldin said. The blast occurred 173 yards from 84,000 fans watching the second quarter of the OU-Kansas State football game in Oklahoma Memorial Stadium.
Mauldin presented the report to Norman's mayor and city council, regarding the effectiveness and manner of law enforcement's response to the explosion. The presentation included video and photos from the scene of the explosion, as well as photos from Hinrichs' apartment.
Mauldin said a similar presentation was scheduled to be delivered at FBI headquarters in Quantico, Va.
Previous reports from the FBI had stated that law enforcement officials might never know if Hinrichs tried to enter the stadium or purchase a ticket for the game, even though surveillance tape was taken from the stadium.
Hinrichs Case
The Norman Police Department released candid details about the death of Joel Henry Hinrichs III to Norman officials Tuesday.
• Hinrichs died in an explosion outside of Oklahoma Memorial Stadium on Oct. 1, 2005.
• Police said Hinrichs had no link to Islamic groups.
• The lack of shrapnel in the bomb reduced its destructive power.
Source: Norman Police Department
“My view is that [the explosion] was an accident,” Mauldin said. “He accidentally set it off.”
Mauldin said he was 102 yards away from the explosion when it occurred and police had set up a secure perimeter within five minutes of the explosion. He also received a call from the FBI within five minutes.
Video footage from a police robot showed an officer in a protective suit investigating the area.
Hinrichs' backpack, which was resting on his lap before the explosion, contained two to three pounds of triacetone triperoxide (TATP). This chemical is currently “the explosive of choice in places like Israel and Palestine" and is the most unstable explosive currently known, Mauldin said.
The bomb contained no shrapnel or fragmentation, which would have greatly increased the amount of damage, Mauldin said.
“The body took most of the blast," Mauldin said.
The bench remained mostly intact after the blast, with damage in only two or three places.
Mauldin said Hinrichs' family requested the bench, but could not offer a reason of why they would want to keep it.
In the video, the investigating officer examined what police originally thought was a second backpack. The officer used an X-ray machine to look inside what turned out to be fragments of the original pack, where they found wires, a battery and pieces of a computer circuit board, Mauldin said.
That pack was detonated by police while the game was still in progress in an effort to neutralize any remaining explosives.
Mauldin said he spoke with OU President David L. Boren on the phone before the second explosion and Boren expressed concern that everything should be handled before the game ended to avoid another explosion after the game.
Mauldin said police monitored the area for radiation, fearing the explosive might have been a dirty bomb.
The presentation included a photograph of Hinrichs' driver license, which shows him with a long beard.
Mauldin said he thought of members of the American Taliban when he saw the driver license photograph.
“They all thought the same thing I thought,” Mauldin said. “This looks like an Islamic terrorist.”
But while Mauldin and others did have initial reactions, he said many media misrepresented the facts in the aftermath of the explosion, speculating about whether Hinrichs attempted to enter the stadium and whether he was connected to Muslim organizations in Norman.
Inside Hinrichs' apartment, police encountered a strong odor of peroxide and “quite a lot of TATP." They also found the ingredients to make the explosive, including acetone, Liquid Fire (which contains sulfuric acid) and Softswim, a pool product that contains hydrogen peroxide, Mauldin said.
Hinrichs mixed the explosives in his apartment and kept them in various locations, Mauldin said.
Police found a pill bottle containing TATP with an inch-long fuse stuck in the top. The bottle was behind Hinrichs' computer and contained enough TATP to completely destroy the computer and make a hole in the wall behind it, Mauldin said.
TATP degrades rapidly and the longer it sits, the greater the danger that the substance will explode spontaneously, Mauldin said.
Hinrichs kept notes in ruled notebooks on how well his explosives performed with and without shrapnel in experiments at Red Rock Canyon near Hinton, Mauldin said.
Police also found live and blank belts of military rifle rounds in Hinrichs' apartment, Mauldin said.
Hinrichs left a note on his computer screen before the explosion. The note was written in the middle of a text file with other notes about bombs.
“F--- all this. None of you are worth living with. You can all kiss my a--,” the note stated.
Thanks Rte66.
I can't recall, but it wasn't a name you'r recognize from the Bradey Bunch, The Fonz or Fibber MaGee and Molly.
Sounded a lot like the names making headlines in Aljezzra.
Fazal Cheema
And his roomate was a Middle Eastern Islamofinatist - who frequented the local Mosque and evidently talked a lot about Jihad.
I'm sick and tired of the "Whitewashing" of Muslims in America.
A few notes about that:
" ...
OU student Fazal Cheema told agents that Hinrichs had responded to his Internet advertisement for a roommate, and said the two didn't socialize.
Cheema said Hinrichs was quiet and kept to himself and that he wasn't aware of Hinrichs' interest in bombs.
......
Hinrichs' Pakistani roommate, Fazal M. Cheema, is Muslim, although not particularly religious, according to regulars at the Norman mosque.
Cheema worked at the football stadium, according to the OU student directory, and the men lived at Parkview Apartments, a university-owned property popular with Islamic students because it is adjacent to the local mosque.
.....
Acquaintances of Cheema's say he is not a practicing Muslim and never attends services at the mosque.
..."
Mohammad said it is permissible to lie to an infidel in order to advance the cause of Islam. Its in the Quran.
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