Deadly Toothpaste

In August 2006, Britain's MI-5 and Scotland Yard announced that they had arrested members of a London-based terrorist cell who were plotting to blow up U.S.-bound passenger jets using liquid explosives hidden inside items brought onboard in carry-on luggage. A U.S. ban swiftly followed that forbade passengers to carry shampoo and bottled water onto commercial flights; it has since been loosened to allow up to 3 ounces.

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The toiletries menace was old news to Louis Mizell of Mizell & Co. International Security, who over the previous month had been receiving requests from law enforcement agencies (he won't say which) requesting intelligence reports documenting previous instances in which terrorists had been discovered carrying liquid explosives and other contraband concealed in tubes of toothpaste. A former state department intelligence officer, Mizell has developed a database of 3 million incidents involving "terrorism, crime, espionage and safety."

The requests prompted Mizell to produce, just a few weeks before the London arrests were made public, a report on "the so-called toothpaste concealment tactic" (see below and on the following five pages). According to Mizell, the toothpaste trick had previously been applied in "aircraft bombings, prison escapes, assassinations, theft of military secrets, drug trafficking and the transportation of deadly biological weapons." In the first known incident (dating to the 1960s), executives of the Soviet airline Aeroflot used toothpaste tubes to smuggle secret Concorde blueprints into the U.S.S.R.

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