UPDATE: The two suspects were released on Thursday morning.
Prosecutor Gunilla Ohlin told The Associated Press that, “There was no reason to keep them under arrest anymore, but the suspicions against them remain.” –USA Today.
Employees evacuate the Oskarshamn nuclear power plant in southern Sweden today. Two Swedish contractors were suspected of preparing to sabotage the power plant after traces of explosives were found on one of the men, police said. (M&C)
TATP has been identified in explosive devices in a number of cases involving terrorists. Richard Reid, who attempted to down American Airlines Flight 63 with a bomb concealed in his shoe, possessed a device containing plastic explosive with a TATP trigger. It is also believed that acetone peroxide was used as the explosive in the 7 July 2005 London bombings.
** Report on Arrakis is following the news today that 2 contractors were arrested at a Swedish nuclear plant.
Two contractors were arrested this morning at the nuclear plant after TATP explosive was detected on one of the suspects.
The AP reported:
Swedish police arrested two maintenance workers on suspicion of plotting sabotage after they tried to enter a nuclear power plant Wednesday with traces of a powerful explosive like that used in the 2005 London transit bombings, officials said.
The plant’s operator, OKG, said no bomb was found and the incident did not pose a threat to the Oskarshamn generating station, which provides 10 percent of Sweden’s electricity.
Experts said a bagful of the suspected explosive would not be powerful enough to damage a nuclear reactor but could wreak havoc in a power plant’s control room.
It was believed to be triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, which is extremely dangerous even in tiny amounts.
“It’s not something you use at home,” Anders Osterberg, a spokesman for plant operator OKG, told The Associated Press. “We’re not dealing with toys here.”
The two men were contractors hired to do maintenance work on one of the facility’s three reactors, which was shut down May 11 for an annual check, plant spokesman Roger Bergman said.
Police did not release the men’s identities, saying only that one was born in 1955 and the other in 1962 and both were Swedish citizens. The older suspect was “known to police” from prior investigations, police spokesman Sven-Erik Karlsson told AP, but he declined to give details…
TATP is highly explosive, and a tiny amount would be enough to blow off a person’s hand, said Svante Karlsson, a weapons expert at the Swedish Defense Research Agency.
He said it had no civilian uses. “It is very unstable, very sensitive to both friction and shocks.”
One of the workers was a welder.
