ISIS takes credit in downing Russian airliner

[Peter Lemkin]

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Question: What is a "foreign" explosive?

Comment: Even though Russia seems kinda vague about their intended targets, they will intensify their bombing.

PS: Also, Egypt has detained somewhere between 2 and 7 employees from the originating airport in connection with Egypt's investigation.

Yes I wondered what that meant too. Can only assume it is either some sort of new explosive not made by Russia. Semtex itself has to have additives to create a detection taggant to identify it. There are still batches of (expired) Semtex which don't have this tagging which would make identifying the explosive difficult. Then again it may be a completely new type of explosive.

Would love to know what's in the CCTV footage from the airport.

There is an agreement [don't know if by treaty] that major explosive manufacturers need to put certain trace chemical labels in their products that allows for a determination that it was their product used in any explosion. This would be so if you purchased an explosive for ordinary purposes or you were an ordinary [non-state] buyer - even if your purpose was not ordinary [terror action et al.]. However, many of the top makers of explosives [especially the very 'sexy' ones] also produce unlabeled explosive for use by intelligence and military operations - so they can not be traced - but this is not admitted to - in fact denied. Add to that, it is possible to create batches of explosive that have the trace chemical 'labels' of a different company than the one that created it [i.e. create a false-flag batch of explosive]...so it is a very tricky game trying to either identify; or trust the word of officials who say they have identified exactly which explosive and manufactured where. Lastly, they can also just lie about what they found. With modern mass spectrographic techniques, a lot can be learned about the place and even date of manufacture of an explosive, but one needs to keep in mind the above caveats. One might presume there also might be a black market in unlabeled explosives - but they, if they exist, would go for a premium price, indeed.

While I'm on this subject, remember that even the nanothermite that was found in the dust of the WTC could be found to be closest in formulation to some that was tested earlier, manufactured for the US Military.....but you don't find that in the NYT. [or even that explosive residues by the ton were found] ::zzzzz::