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| Europe | |
| Large Semtex cache stolen in France | |
| 2008-07-20 | |
| Enough Semtex to make 56 bombs the size of the one used in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing has been stolen from a French castle. The 28 kilograms of the explosive were discovered to be missing yesterday along with an unknown quantity of detonators, but the Interior Ministry said they could have been taken more than a week ago. The Lyon depot is situated in a disused 19th century castle at Corbas near Lyon and is used by a civil defence unit to store explosives needed for bomb disposal workers. "A theft of explosives used by bomb-disposal experts to destroy munitions retrieved from former battlefields has taken place," said a statement from the Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie. The statement said there had been "security failings" which gave the thieves their chance. The Semtex is now being searched for by French anti-terrorist police who fear it could be used to attack civilian targets. Semtex is favoured by terrorists because it is powerful, has no smell and is almost impossible to detect. "The investigation has to find out how they could have been stolen," a police source said, adding that the authorities were taking the theft "very seriously."
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| Posted by:lotp |
| #6 On it's way to ........... Beijing? |
| Posted by: Brett 2008-07-20 21:18 |
| #5 I take back my question, in light of further information. Thank you, gentlemen. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-07-20 18:08 |
| #4 I saw some of this when I was in Germany the first time. The US began building a new barracks at one of our downtown compounds, and found something like 84 mortar rounds when they were digging the basement. This was an installation that had been in constant use by the military since the end of WWII, and the weapons were discovered in 1974. England, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, the Eastern European countries, all have similar problems with unexploded ordinance. You read about a "find" every few weeks, if you happen to be in Europe, and can read one of the local newspapers. The sheer amount of weaponry used is staggering. A similar problem exists in Afghanistan, where the Russians supposedly left several MILLION mines behind when they left, most buried in unmarked minefields. |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2008-07-20 15:12 |
| #3 To cut some slack to those civil defense guys - not that it is not a big screw up... -, destroying unexploded ammunition is so common in France it's probably hard to get it in perspective for a foreigner... something like 900 tons a year recovered from Verdun alone, and an estimate of seven centuries needed at current rate of recovery just to clear out WWI unexploded ammo (JFM will correct me). So, this cache was not a "top secret" or "sensitive" one, it was just a cog in that huge work, a bit of a very mundane, run-of-the-mill enterprize; and if you want to put it in an ever worse light, just think that there actually are stockpiles upon stockpiles of unexploded shells in various stages of decay, including chemicals ones, lying in open air, with basically no security at all. There just isn't enough manpower, enough EOD to keep the rythm. |
| Posted by: anonymous5089 2008-07-20 11:47 |
| #2 Err... aren't caches like this supposed to be guarded against exactly this kind of thing? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-07-20 09:32 |
| #1 And I thought the French were improving. I was wrong. |
| Posted by: McZoid 2008-07-20 07:24 |