Two 18-year-olds in different part of the United States have been arrested for constructing home-made explosive devices. It comes as many question national security effectiveness following the Boston Marathon bombing.
Joshua Prater, a student at Marcos de Niza High School in Tempe,
Arizona was arrested on Tuesday after a cleaning lady found what
later turned out to be a home-made bomb in his house.
The woman noticed a strange device with wires sticking out while
doing her regular cleaning. She took the device to the local fire
station, where police specialists identified it as an improvised
explosive device (IED).
"They had it X-rayed, they saw it was a valid IED. It was
something that wasn't big, but could cause serious injuries and the
death of someone," said Tempe Police Sgt. Mike Pooley as cited
by KTAR Newsroom.
The device was disabled and the house where it was found searched
where more explosives were discovered. The 18-year-old was arrested
by police on charges of possessing a prohibited weapon.
Prater’s possible plan for using the IED are being
investigated.
On the same day, 18-year-old Mason Beuning was detained in
Gainsville, Florida for allegedly stealing from a local Walmart
store items which could be used for making an IED. The bomb squad
searched the teenager’s home and found a device.
"It was a small device. Definitely would have injured
someone who was right next to it, but the device was not something
that would cause a great amount of destruction," Gainesville
Police Officer Ben Tobias said as cited by ActionNewsJax.com.
Beuning’s friends, questioned by police, said the device was
assembled just for fun, to explode it in the woods.
The arrests come at the time when the US is on alert, following the
Boston Marathon bombings which three people dead and over 200
injured. Two young men who emigrated to the US from Russia in 2001
were accused of the attack using improvised explosive devices.
That tragedy has led to people starting questioning the
effectiveness of the anti-terror campaign the US has been engaged
in since 9/11.
“I believe this was a massive failure of the surveillance state
that we’ve created in America. Since 9/11 we spent over $700
billion on national security and a lot of that is surveillance with
video cameras, with massive data collection, with fusion centers,
and none of those helped to deter or detect any terrorist plot. And
while the surveillance video was useful in reconstructing what
happened it didn’t prevent it,” American lawyer Jesselyn Radack told RT.
Now with the information on making anything, including bombs, being
available online, cases of teens building IEDs is becoming more
common.
A week ago a teenage girl in Florida was arrested for allegedly
“discharging weapons or firerarms” on the grounds of her school in
the town of Bartow. 16-year-old Kiera Wilmot says she was only
carrying out an experiment, mixing substances in a plastic bottle.
The chemical reaction tore the bottle’s cap off and led to the girl
being taken away to police department.
At the end of April, a New Jersey teenager was charged with
possession of explosive devices, when police discovered 6 IEDs in
different stages of assembly in his house. That was part of the
police’s investigation into bombing threats left at the boy’s
school on the same day Boston Marathon bombs went off.