[af_vet_rr]

At midday, press reports indicated that five people had been injured. If this has changed, I'm not aware of it.

Spunky said there were no witnesses - I guess I should have checked before assuming they were right.

Either way, if he was looking to commit suicide, well in this thread or another, somebody mentioned how a lot of people who are suicidal will goto a public area trying to get attention and get somebody to stop them (or on the flip side - suicide by cop, as it's called apparently).

Maybe it's the engineer in me, but I'm a firm believer in Occam's Razor - somebody with mental problems committing suicide is a much simpler theory than the "he was taken in by Islamics and converted/brainwashed" theory.

After all, 100s and 1000s of people commit suicide every year, many in public areas, and plenty of mentally unstable people try to kill others ever year (just witness Las Vegas recently) without there being some kind of Islamic conspiracy behind it.

[PhiKapMom]

There were witnesses just not close enough to see him blow up and get hurt but they felt the force and a bus driver has been quoted as being blown back. That person saw the kid sitting on the bench I read somewhere today.

[conservativepoet]

I appreciate your effort to keep things simple and less confused. In times of challenge it is a necessity. But I wonder how Occam's Razor would have faired after the first plane hit the first trade tower. It would have sounded something like "man, what an accident that was." Simplicity is good, but humanity has a way of making things rather complicated.

[idkfa]

Wow. Took me forever to catch up from last night. After reading through all the speculation, rumors and embellishments, let me revise my original statement I made back in post 638:

Occam's Razor. Sometimes a kid that blows himself up is just a kid that blows himself up.

[Uncle Ike]

"Maybe it's the engineer in me, but I'm a firm believer in Occam's Razor -"

Occam's Razor is only appropriate if it accounts for ALL of the factors.

When you factor in:

a) explosives are the "weapon of choice" of (Islamic) terrorists worldwide for small-scale attacks

b) this country remains under threat of attack from (Islamic) terrorists. (The default "code-yellow" terrorism alert level is two steps ABOVE "nothing to see here", regardless of how comfortable and complacent we've gotten)

Then the logical default assumption in any incident involving explosives - especially in a (potentially) crowded public place - should be Terrorism, until such time as facts demonstrate otherwise.

IMO