In September 2021, a 26-year-old French national, influenced by far-right ideology, was arrested for having successfully manufactured four improvised explosive devices (IEDs) containing uranium in his home (TRIPwire, September 9). Four months earlier, a 16-year-old boy of Syrian origin, who had been radicalized by the jihadist ideology of the Islamic State (IS), was convicted and charged with attempting to carry out an attack in Norway using nicotine poison that he had manufactured in his garage (World Today News, May 27; Norwell, June 30). These two examples highlight the continued threat of so-called ‘garage extremists’, who are lone actors with little to no connection to a wider terrorist network, but are increasingly taking advantage of technological advancements to manufacture homemade chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) weapons.
Emerging Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Threats from Europe’s ‘Garage Extremists’ (Rueben Dass, The Jamestown Foundation)
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