"To weaponize a flu that still hasn't reached the human-human mutation and only barely animal-human is likely beyond most technologies."
There are ways of pushing a virus in either direction through generations, to less dangerous or more dangerous forms. Obviously much work is underfoot to push it to a more harmless form as well as develope vaccines quickly.
This H5N1 has a very high mortality in birds and mammals and has a track record of jumping species. It unfortunately isn't beyond the technology of many nefarious governments (such as Cuba*) to push it into a bioweapon and bioengineering is very hot in the universities (and too often they have shown in admission or hiring of potential terrorists a glaring lack of scruples ) but any avian flu that has jumped species is a threat without such tampering as precedence to mutate into a human to human variant shows.
We are in a race against time but we can't assume the seconds on the clock will be of the regular interval (with a regular herald wave that will allow for more vaccine production) or whether they will be sped up by either global travel or man made tampering.
*Cuban Docs are the backbone in the medical communities of many third world countries.
Could be, I'm a geologist, not a geneticist. But I don't assess terror groups having the capability to do such things. Capable of already established diseases, but I doubt that they are behind the current virus on everyone's radar.
Have you heard anything about a bunch of dead chickens turning up in Puerto Rico? I can't find anything on it. Got the scoop from my mother-in-law who saw it on the Spanish channel.