Keld Bach�s Press Cuttings � Blog Archive � Why did the lights go out?

Keld Bach�s Press Cuttings � Blog Archive � Why did the lights go out?



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« Details of deadly Jordan bombings emerge
Why did the lights go out?
A security official said lights in sections of both the Radisson and Hyatt hotels went out just before the near-simultaneous blasts in apparently coordinated fashion, the International Herald Tribune reported:
A man who was working as a disc jockey at the Radisson, where a Jordanian-Palestinian wedding reception was bombed, also recalled how the ballroom where the party was being held mysteriously went dark.
“The lights at the wedding hall went off seconds, maybe just one second, before the blast, although there was electricity outside the room in the corridor, the nearby lobby area and the reception,” said Fadi al-Kessi.
“For some reason, I looked to my right in the darkness and saw what looked liked lightning, then there was a loud boom. It felt like the explosion came from the ceiling, then people started running out.”
The DJ was putting on the traditional tabla drum music for the bride and groom to enter the hotel ballroom when suddenly the lights went out and the sound system went dead. Seconds later, he saw a flash and heard a loud explosion, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported:
Once inside, they [the Iraqi couple] staked out different parts of the ballroom. Al-Shamari took up position on the right, where men were sitting in the gathering, which was segregated in line with conservative Islamic tradition. Al-Shamari was talking on his mobile phone constantly, witnesses told police.
Al-Rishawi found a seat on the left, near chatting women and a handful of playing children.
But when the moment arrived for al-Rishawi to trigger her explosives belt, there was a problem. She gestured to her husband that it wouldn’t explode.
The couple met up near the doorway to the ballroom, and guests told police they saw the husband angrily gesture toward the woman, telling her to leave.
As she moved toward the door, the lights went out and her husband jumped onto a dining table and detonated his belt, sending the ceiling crashing down and spraying molten ball-bearings across the room.
[…]
The disc jockey, Fadi al-Kessi, was just putting on the music when the power went out. Still, electricity was on outside the ballroom.
Seconds later, he “saw what looked like lightning and there was a loud boom. It felt like the explosion came from the ceiling, then people started running out,” he told AP.
It was not clear why the lights went out just before the blast, which killed at least 36 people, including the fathers of the bride and groom.
Maybe xymphora has figured out how this ‘mystery’ can be solved:
The civilian deaths were required to lay the basis for the suicide bomb fable. In other words, most people died simply to hide the identity of the real targets, as an attack against only those people would make the identity of the killers too obvious. The bombers needed a sure-fire way to ensure that the targets were together in a room pre-planted with the bombs, and that the bombs in the other hotels were detonated at the same time as the bomb directed at the real targets.
A timer wouldn’t work, as no one could be sure when the targets would be together in the room. Cell phone triggers might not work, and a radio signal might be jammed (especially with all the spies about). So they came up with a clever low-tech solution. The bombs were pre-planted in the ceilings, and hooked up to the hotel electrical systems. As long as the power was on, the detonators were off. As soon as the power was interrupted, the detonators were triggered.
Someone at the front desk in charge of booking the rooms booked the Chinese and Palestinians into the same conference room, made sure they were all in, and then used the house phone to call the hotel electrical room. The agent in the electrical room telephoned the other hotels to tell them to set off their almost simultaneous cover explosions which disguised the real target, and flipped the circuit breaker to the room containing the Chinese and Palestinians. Boom! An added bonus is that the darkness hid the real source of the blasts, allowing for the creation of the suicide bomber explanation.
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 16th, 2005 at 18:40:04 and is filed under Israel, Iraq, Terrorism, United States, Jordan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.