6/3/2002: Suicide bomber shrapnel

[Undertoad]

If you're a suicide bomber, you want to get the most out of your detonation. So part of your method is to pack your bombing belt with all kinds of nails and scrap metal so as to do the maximum human damage. That way, when you blow up, scattering with your body parts will be thousands of little pieces of metal.

This is why stories often report something like "3 dead, 20 injured" as opposed to, say, "2 dead, 2 injured"; the blast radius doesn't just include flying pieces of bomber, it also includes flying metal which causes most of the "injury" number.

And in some cases, as in the one shown here (showing the lower back and abdomen), the "injured" means injured very severely indeed. Not only do the nails fly, they often enter bystanders' bodies head-first. And red-hot.

Ow.

This is from the right-wing conspiro-rag World Net Daily, which I don't generally like much, but x-rays don't lie. The story here is excerpted:
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Messing said one of the victims he saw while in Jerusalem had around 300 individual metallic fragments within his body. The metal fragments, measuring from millimeters to centimeters, were imbedded in the young man literally from head to toe, he said.

"Several of the fragments penetrated into his vital organs. He sustained a punctured colon, a collapsed lung, and a lacerated liver and kidney. I could actually feel the nails under his skin where they had burrowed and lodged," Messing recalls.
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