Times Square bomb scare: Bomber bought wrong fireworks

Updated on: 06 May,2010 07:35 AM IST |
Agencies |

Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad not only bought the wrong kind of fertilizer for his home-made weapon of mass destruction -- he also used the wrong kind of fireworks to ignite the potentially deadly device, it was revealed today

The fireworks -- M88 Silver Salutes -- will only explode if they are individually lit, according to Bruce Zoldan, who owns the 55-store Phantom Fireworks chain, which includes the Matamoros outlet where Shahzad made his buy.

Zoldan said Shahzad probably believed that the 152 M88 Silver Salutes he left in a Nissan Pathfinder next to canisters of gasoline and propane and bags of fertilizer would ignite as a group if one was set alight next to them, which is not the case.

Fireworks not lit

Each of of the M88s have to be lit individually for them to ignite, Zoldan said. If Shahzad has bought illegal M80s on the black market as he could have easily done, "The outcome in New York would have been much different and we would have had loss of life," he said.

Instead, the bomb Shahzad admittedly left in the Pathfinder in Times Square on Saturday evening only smoldered after he lit at least one of the firecrackers, investigators said. And the fertilizer left in the bomb turned out to be non-explosive, which meant the explosion caused any successful ignition of the propane and gasoline would have been much less powerful.

Zoldan said Shahzad purchased at least some of the fireworks used in the bomb about eight weeks ago.

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