So much for the terrorists being “highly trained and organised”

Turns out they used homemade explosives – the kind of thing you can knock up in your garage on a weekend, using stuff bought from the supermarket and pharmacy.

Read this report in The Malta Independent.

It says that the attackers used TATP/triacetone triperoxide, the same improvised explosive that was used in the London transport bombings which killed 52 people in 2005.

The U.S. government’s National Counterterrorism Center lists TATP as a common explosive and describes it as “relatively easy to synthesize.” Experts have said that tracing the materials used to make the explosive can be difficult because they are so readily available in stores.

The counterterrorism centre’s website describes the explosive as a mixture of “hydrogen peroxide and acetone with the addition of an acid, such as sulfuric, nitric, or hydrochloric acid.

This is important information, because those people shouldn’t be inflated into something they are not: a highly organised and hyper-efficient crack-commando unit of terrorists. They’re a bunch of disenfranchised and resentfully bitter, disturbed and chippy youths who are, essentially, not much different to the rejects who pick up guns and begin shooting in shopping malls, cinemas and university campuses in America.

They do terrible damage and leave a great deal of carnage precisely because, like those American teenagers, they don’t care if they die while killing the people who represent what they despise, the source of their rejection.

The difference in this case is that they have found solace in a wider cause and loose groupings which gives their sorry lives purpose and their murderous death-wish some meaning and context outside themselves. But these are no commandos of terrorism and it’s crucial to bear that in mind.

It makes the work of the police and security services more difficult, because these miserable and bitter youths can be just about anyone.

There’s a lot of talk about “radicalising”, but I think even that is greatly exaggerated, and it doesn’t help to make it sound so extreme and mysterious, when the dangers lie so much closer to home and to ‘normal’ society. Think about how it is relatively easy to drag an unhappy teenager into a life of crime or into a sect.

There is no need to radicalise miserable young men and train them in Syrian camps when there are plenty of miserable young men who are European natives and citizens and who can be manipulated into doing what you want. Last Friday’s perpetrators – those who have been identified, at least – were French citizens. That should come as no surprise.

The psychology behind this awful business is beginning to shape up to resemble American campus and shopping mall ‘revenge on society’ shooting sprees, but involving explosives as well and guns, and young men who are cooperating instead of going it alone.

We’re in a whole different situation here to the airborne attacks which brought down the Twin Towers in 2001. That was completely different.