Suicidal Man With Sodium Cyanide Found in NYC Subway

AOLNEWS ^ | NEW YORK (April 30) | AOLNEWS

[Robe]

A suicidal college student who carried highly toxic sodium cyanide into a subway tunnel caused a brief terrorism scare early Friday, police said.

Track workers spotted the 20-year-old man - wearing a hard hat, safety vest and boots - at about 5:30 a.m. wandering deep inside the tunnel under the East River.

[MAexile]

If he stopped the train in the tunnel and then activated (not sure what you do with cyanide) there would have been massive deaths.

He would need to have dilute sulfuric acid to generate hydrogen cyanide. Just like the gas chamber.

[null and void]

The only positive thing about this was that the name of the perp did not appear super muzzie-esque.

Two words: Richard Reid...

[swarthyguy]

Heck, David Headley.

[mstar]

All terrorists want to commit suicide, only they want to take a bunch of innocent folks along with them.

[oh8eleven]

You don’t even need to jump in front of a moving subway to be killed, drop down to the tracks and touch the electrified third rail.
Excellent point, but he probably didn't even know there was a third rail. They don't exist in Pakistan.

[Carley]

I’ll go with they’re stupid.

[darkside321]

You don’t even need to jump in front of a moving subway to be killed, drop down to the tracks and touch the electrified third rail.

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But considering “todays” energy costs???
No way just think about the “wasted” electricity needed to kill him. this would be about 10 cents more for the overall energy bill of the city in this month ;-)
greetings

[Jack Hydrazine]

“caused a brief terrorism scare early Friday”

Is it Friday already?

[SparkyBass]

ISOLATED INCIDENT alert :)

[darkside321]

Is it Friday already?

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Depends where you live ;-)
For me (Europe it only takes two hours)

[Old Professer]

Available at any auto parts store.

[backwoods-engineer]

"suicidal college student"

Just youths.

Not Moslem, or al-Qaeda-connected, or anything.

If he was, how many days until it comes out? You KNOW the state-run media will suppress it.

[sig226]

No. The reaction used to release the cyanide in a gas chamber is a classic reduction-oxidation reaction. Sodium cyanide plus sulfuric acid produces hydrogen cyanide and sodium sulfate.
Na(CN) + H₂(SO₄)=2H(CN)+Na₂(SO₄)
You need the highly reactive hydrogen ions in the acid to get the lethal gas. If he ate the sodium cyanide pellets, they would have killed him, but the stuff he had would not cause a lethal gas attack. This may mean he really was suicidal, or that he was poorly informed like the idiot with the Times Square bomb.

[Jack Hydrazine]

In NYC?

[sig226]

I haven’t got the equation balanced right. Oh well.

[a fool in paradise]

The Times Square bomber had been trained. Either he made some substitutions or was fed misinformation so that he could be caught, and his investigation monitored as research for covering the tracks on a bigger strike.

I am not proposing this conjecture, others have already put it out in the arena of ideas.

If you are picked up with the components you BELIEVE to be a bomb or gas attack (but really are not enough to do any harm at all), your case could result in a lesser charge of criminal mayhem. At any rate, the media coverage (blaming tea partiers over Islamists even when Pakistan’s terrorists took credit for it) and subsequent investigation and government talking points are something to consider.

The Islamists WANT attention. They kept amping up attacks when Bill Clinton was president. The WTC 2001 attacks came before of little response to the Khobar Towers and USS Cole bombings. Those anniversaries are coming up. Will the media remember?

They neglected to cover the 40th anniversary of the Weather Underground’s Greenwich Village bomb factory apartment murders this March.

[darkside321]

In NYC?

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Why not? isn´t NYC called the city which never sleeps?
You know after hundrets of years without sleeping you may confuse some facts ;-)
But to sum it up (i´m a little bit drunk right now “not too serious” as said beyond 10 pm here in europe) and i tryied to be funny. I guess this didn´t work very well! ;-)
So i was just joking.
Have a nice day.

[a fool in paradise]

Either he made some substitutions or was fed misinformation so that he could be caught

To clarrify this point, either he accidently didn't follow the ingredients list or was deliberately misinformed. Or perhaps we are being fed misinformation that it wasn't going to go off...

[Jack Hydrazine]

LOL!

[sig226]

I can’t see the logic in making a disfunctioning bomb to see how the investigation would proceed. If it exploded, they would also investigate it, and they’d use NSA and CIA assetts that would not be used in a less significant case.

I’m not saying that Shazad wasn’t trained, only that he was an idiot. I expect that Mr. Subway Idiot will turn out to be exactly that - an idiot. We learned how the gas chamber works in high school chemistry class, and cyanides are very common ions, so we learned all kinds of things that can be done with them. Al Queda has plenty of knowledgable chemists.