More Details Emerge in MLK day Bomb Plot

The Bomb was laced with Rat Poison

A bomb maker mixed chemicals with shrapnel in what law enforcement officials say was a weapon designed to inflict maximum injuries during last week’s Martin Luther King Jr. march in downtown Spokane.

Tests are being conducted to determine the type of chemical and whether it made the bomb potentially more deadly, Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich said Tuesday.

“I know the bomb had some kind of chemical material inside, but we are still trying to figure out what kind. All we know there is a substance,” Knezovich said. “If there was an added dimension, it added to the lethality of it.”

Knezovich said early talks indicated the chemical could have been a compound used in common rat poison. Rat poison has been added to bombs in the Middle East for the stated purpose of acting as an anti-coagulant – which inhibits the ability of bleeding wounds to clot.

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Within the past decade rat poison reportedly has been mixed into bombs. Israeli security officials, for example, suspected Palestinian militants of lacing shrapnel with rat poison because of its anti-coagulant properties. Officials believed the intent was to cause wounded survivors of bombings to bleed profusely from their wounds, although the effectiveness of the method has been called into question.

A common rat poison sold in the United States, for example, is made from warfarin. The compound also is used in medicine to treat harmful blood clots.

Officials indicate the presence of Rat Poison was likely an overt act to either make wounds more difficult to treat or to sow more fear. Either way the FBI is referring to this as an act of Domestic Terrorism.