After the attempted Times Square bomber failed to properly explode his bomb it is easy to forget how much destruction there could have been if the bomb had exploded. An FBI simulation of the effects has been published by The New York Post:
A secret FBI test of a correctly made version of the Times Square bomb revealed that it “would have killed thousands of people” if it had been made to explode as terrorists had intended, law-enforcement sources told The Post yesterday.
Had he built the Times Square device the way he had originally intended to, terrorist Faisal Shahzad, would have turned his SUV and nearby vehicles into a fatal spray of razor-sharp fragments and transformed building windows into glass guillotines hurtling to the streets, cutting down hundreds of people walking by.
The results were discovered after feds composed the type of bomb Shahzad set out to make — with the exact components he had initially intended to use — and exploded it in Pennsylvania last month.
“It would have been the biggest thing ever to happen in this country since Sept. 11,” another source said.
“It definitely would have been bigger than [the 1995] Oklahoma City” bombing of the federal building that killed 168 people, the source said. “There would have been a lot of casualties.”
“People would also have been stomped to death from running away. It would have been panic. The buildings would have been severely damaged.”
Fortunately the bomb didn’t explode and a street vendor notified authorities about the smoking vehicle.
