ISIS Claims Bomb Hidden in Soda Can Took Down Russian Airliner
— -- A new image has surfaced online of the bomb, hidden in a soda can, that ISIS claims was responsible for downing a Russian airliner over Egypt late last month, killing more than 200 people.
The image, included in the latest issues of an ISIS magazine, shows a soda can and what explosives experts told ABC News are a blasting cap and an electric initiator. The ISIS magazine said the image showed “the IED [improvised explosive device] used to bring down the Russian airliner.”
The magazine’s publication comes just a day after top Russian officials announced that they had concluded a bomb had taken down the plane. An ISIS affiliate in Egypt claimed responsibility for the tragedy just hours after the plane crashed.
The head of Russia’s FSB security service told President Vladimir Putin during a televised meeting Tuesday that his experts had concluded that a homemade explosive device with the equivalent of about two pounds of TNT had been placed aboard the plane.
A former Army special operations soldier trained in explosives told ABC News the photo suggested to him that the bomb may have been manually detonated by someone on board the plane. Kevin Barry, an explosives expert and former member of the NYPD bomb squad, disagreed, saying that the purported bomb could very well have been detonated with a timer, a theory supported by a senior U.S. official briefed on the situation.
The official told ABC News U.S. analysts have spent the last hours in classified sessions, going over what is known about how the Metrojet airplane was downed.
“There are still a lot of questions,” said the senior official, “but the consensus is that it was a timer that was set for two hours. That would guarantee that the plane was going to be in the sky.”
When it comes to the ISIS photo, however, the official said that American experts suspect it could be bogus.
“If I just pulled off a successful bombing, I would give you disinformation,” the official said. “Why would you tell everyone how you did it?”
The ISIS magazine also repeated claims of responsibility for the Paris attacks, which took more than 120 lives, calling the murders “revenge” for French airstrikes.
[Editor’s Note: This report has been updated to clarify the opinions of the explosives experts.]
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