‘Many died because of this piece of plastic’: Corrupt security wand deal left Iraq vulnerable to Baghdad bomb
Convicted and sentenced for fraud. Couldn't an enterprising prosecuting attorney make a decent case for accessory to murder? :mad:
After at least 187 people were killed in a devastating Islamic State bomb attack in the Iraqi capital, Iraqis turned their anger toward a symbol of government corruption and the state’s failure to protect them: fake bomb detectors.(National Post)
The wand-like devices, little more than an aerial attached to a plastic handle, are still widely in use at security checkpoints around the country even years after the British con man who sold them was arrested for fraud and the U.K. banned their export.
They are used at the entrances to embassies, compounds and government ministries. They are used by security forces at checkpoints such as those on the shopping street at Karrada that was hit in the suicide bombing in the early hours of Sunday morning, and has been targeted numerous times in the past.
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Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced Sunday night that all the country’s security forces should remove the handheld devices from checkpoints and that the Ministry of Interior should reopen its investigation into the corrupt deals for the devices.
But they were still in use in Baghdad the following morning, and it’s unclear when the move will be implemented.
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“We haven’t received an order yet,” said Muqdad al-Timimi, a police officer at a checkpoint in northern Baghdad who was still using one of the devices. “We know it doesn’t work, everybody knows it doesn’t work and the man who made it is in prison now. But I don’t have any other choice.”
The device, known as the ADE 651, was sold to Iraq by Jim McCormick, a British man who was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a U.K. court in 2014 for fraud. He had been arrested in 2010 when export of the device was banned by the British government.
McCormick is thought to have made more than $80 million selling the devices in countries including Iraq. McCormick’s company had claimed that the devices could detect contraband such as drugs and explosives from as far as a kilometer away. The manual for the device had said that with the right “substance detection cards” the devices could even detect elephants or $100 bills.
A BBC investigation in 2010 concluded that it was impossible that the device could detect anything at all. It described it as a “glorified dousing rod.”
They are all simply rebranded versions of “Gopher: The Amazing Golf Ball Finder!,” which wasn’t even capable of that. The aerial simply swings in response to any small movement by the hand of the operator. The Gopher sold for $69, but McCormick sold the devices to Iraq for thousands of dollars each, according to news reports.
Convicted and sentenced for fraud. Couldn't an enterprising prosecuting attorney make a decent case for accessory to murder? :mad:
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