Listen here.In this edition of NdB Sunday Show with Chris Steyn, explosives expert Willem Els of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) reveals just how deadly a bomb-making recipe was used by the 15-year-old boy who wanted to commit mass killing at a Ballito mall. “what was really alarming for me when I look at especially the one ingredient that he stipulated…with any explosive substance that you mix, you have to have two ingredients. The one is your reducing agent and one is your oxidizing agent. So… one is the fuel and the other one… provides the oxygen inside the mixture. So that was there. And also we see that it was similar, not exactly the same, but similar to, for instance, the type of explosives that was mixed by ISIS in Europe, especially the attacks in Paris, the attack on the airport in Brussels. And so that killed a lot of people. Very similar. Also, then referred to as the Mother of Satan, those explosives.” The boy’s bomb-making recipe was contained in the last paragraph of a Manifesto written by him. As for why the bomb did not detonate, Els says: “I believe it was a flaw in his construction…it was just burning very fast instead of detonating.” Meanwhile, police are on high alert for copy cat attacks, and Els expresses faith that - despite questions remaining about the initial handling of the case - the investigation is now being properly done by expert investigators..Edited transcript of the interview.Chris Steyn (00:01.12)Welcome to the NdB Sunday Show with me, Chris Steyn and Willem Els of the Institute for Security Studies. Welcome back, Willem.Willem Els (00:11.672)Thank you, Chris.Chris Steyn (00:13.728)Willem, questions are piling up about the handling of the Ballito Bomb plot. You and I have had a chance to study the boys Manifesto in depth. Chillingly at the end of that Manifesto is his recipe, his bomb-making recipe. Now you are an explosives expert. In fact, you taught General Mkhwanazi how to dismantle bombs. How dangerous a bomb was this boy making? Or had he made?Willem Els (00:47.404)Yeah, thank you for that. I think it's a very important question, especially in the wake of what happened. We must just first reiterate that the police are investigating, the Hawks are investigating, the case is ongoing. So we do not know a lot about the case itself apart from what we could have delved and pulled out of his Manifesto.So that is really troublesome because along with the recipe, he had a plan of action. And he really stipulated out his plan of action and his intent on what to do. Now he wanted to use what we refer to as an IED or an Improvised Explosive Device. And he said he's going to add some nails to the device in order to kill and maim as many people as possible. He was going to place it in a duffel bag in the restaurants area of the mall. And then he indicated that he will wait at a safe place from there and then with a knife and some pepper spray. And then the people fleeing away from the bomb, he would then engage with them and stab them with a knife. And then after that, he was going to...according to him, get some poison and cyanide and then he would actually commit suicide. So that was his plan of action for this thing. And if you look at the recipe, we're not going to go in depth in all the ingredients of the recipe, but that recipe is available on the Internet and on the Dark Net as well. And we know that our school children and our young people are very savvy on the Net and have access to a lot of these things. So if you now go on the Internet and Google and you type in and search for homemade explosive with the homemade readily available ingredients, I mean, you will get 40, 50,000 different websites that can teach you how to do that. The problem with that is on all those websites, they do not always have the warnings.Willem Els (03:02.818)They do not caution you about the dangers. It doesn't caution you, for instance, that there will be a heat reaction. It must be mixed on uncertain temperatures, et cetera, et cetera, making it very dangerous for the people that take that recipe and they are not very experienced as chemists…But going back to the recipe, you know, what was really alarming for me when I look at especially the one ingredient that he stipulated there that is part of his recipe… so with any explosive substance that you mix, you have to have two ingredients. The one is your reducing agent and one is your oxidizing agent. So there's the one is the fuel and the other one is that it provides the oxygen inside the mixture. So that was there.And also we see that it was similar, not exactly the same, but similar to, for instance, the type of explosives that was mixed by ISIS in Europe, especially the attacks in Paris, the attack on the airport in Brussels. And so that killed a lot of people. Very similar. Also, then referred to ISIS as the Mother of Satan, that explosives. So it's not exactly the same. It's got some of the ingredients, but it just indicates to you that this is what you can get on the internet. Some years ago, Chris and I, maybe I must go back to some of my experiences where children actually mixed these type of explosives. I was still in the police and I was traveling home. And I was called that there was an explosion at one of the police compounds in Lynwood Road, or just off Lynwood Road in Pretoria. And when I got there, I found a guy of similar age as this guy.Willem Els (05:00.352)Apparently he was good at chemistry and in school…they mixed some explosives and they tested it on the tennis court at school. And then this guy wanted to make a bigger bomb, you always want to go bigger and bigger and he mixed the explosives and he confined it within a...homemade…confined it in cardboard rolls and plaster of Paris and all the things that he mixed it up, he constructed it with. And then he wanted to actually confine and stamp the explosives. Now this type of explosives is extremely sensitive to heat, shock or friction. And he used the handle of a cricket bat. He placed the device between his legs, feet, and he was sitting on his bed and he was stamping it down. And unfortunately, he detonated. So when I got there, he was laying on his bed of what was left of his bed and under his knees, there was nothing. Both his legs were blown away.That was to me a very traumatic experience. You know, this young man, he had his whole life ahead of him and this is what happened. Now, this similar thing can happen with other children that are also experimenting with these things. It's extremely dangerous. You know, I know in the groups they chat and it's nice to make a bang, make a crackle...and children are curious. But it is extremely, extremely dangerous to actually mix these...these ingredients - and most of them, you know, like with this one, it comes from your readily available homemade ingredients. It's in the house. It is our household ingredients. So that makes it very, very dangerous. And we must really caution our children, you know. It can happen to them as well. Fortunately, in this incident, it did not happen.Willem Els (06:50.06)He mixed it safely and it seems that he managed to build this device, to deliver this device and unfortunately for him, fortunately for us, it did not detonate, deflagrated in the form of smoke and so on.Chris Steyn (07:03.378)What do you think prevented the explosion?Willem Els (07:08.782)I think the intent for him to plants…he did everything that he intended to do. But normally what you do, you have to have a good knowledge of… why things are in your recipe and also in your construction of the device. So I believe it was a flaw in his construction that actually caused this device deflagrated or deflagrated fast burning. So it was just burning very fast instead of detonating.Chris Steyn (07:38.177)Willem, now let's recap. He planted this device on a Sunday in a packed food court. The date was 29 March. He was not arrested. The FBI alerted The Hawks, but the bomb had already been placed. He then spent time in a psychiatric hospital, but on July 1 he was back at the mall. On July 3 he was arrested. But last week he was released again. What is happening with this case as far as you know?Willem Els (08:09.634)Yeah, that is very alarming the way in how this case has been dealt with. I think there are a lot of questions to be asked and I believe there will be an investigation and there will be some consequences because the way it was dealt with was not really in the interest of public safety and also of the rule of law. Having said that, ever since The Hawks have taken over the case, they are busy with the case now and we believe that progress will be made because incidents like these are normally investigated by your Cats, your Crimes against the State Unit, very experienced investigators. And we assume that that is going to really end well for the investigation. In terms of the response of the mall, that they follow their own procedures, we don't know. It will come out, but it doesn't seem that that happened. But also, with the local police, they should have opened the case, and then there should have been an arrest. And then also, when they confiscate any of these exhibits, like this device that just burned, it should be booked into your SAP 30, that is your Exhibit Register. There are certain prescripts, like what we call Standing Orders in order to deal with that. But we saw that there's some speculation whether it was booked in or not. But also at the end of the day, are also indications that this Improvised Explosive Device was then handed back by the police to the mother of this child.Chris Steyn (09:46.282)Does this not illustrate the dangers of dismissing the deadliness of an Improvised Explosive Device? I think you can tell us just how deadly they can be.Willem Els (09:57.452)Yeah, exactly. And what I believe, I think it's maybe a wake-up call. Fortunately, there were no deaths or injuries here. But it is maybe the time now that the police and the authorities embark on an awareness programme, because it is very important that the public must be informed. It is very important that the children must be informed about the dangers, but also about the consequences should they then play with these things. So I believe the police will do that. I know that they want to act proactively. Once that has happened, we believe that once that awareness is amongst our children, it will prevent similar incidents in the future.Chris Steyn (10:42.858)There are fears now of copycat attacks. What are your sources in the police telling you they are preparing to do to try and prevent that?Willem Els (10:53.71)Well, in the first place, you know, the guys are on alert and they are really ready to deal with that. But unfortunately with incidents like these, if you don't have intelligence on it, you know, it's difficult to act proactively. So that is a challenge that we have. And also we refer to this type of incidents as a Lone Wolf incident. You know, it is one of your more difficult sort of operations to crack intelligence-wise. Because when you've got a few people or a cell working, there's communications, there's money transfers, there's a lot of these things that you can investigate. And also that can give you an indication that something is happening like this. The only time sometimes with these is once they get onto a group, like on the Telegram group, and then they post their Manifest, then you pick it up. And then most often it's too late.Chris Steyn (11:50.688)Willem, what did you make of the rest of the Manifesto? Parts of it were written by the boy himself, because one could tell and he he doesn't seem highly educated, but then there were parts that were perfectly composed, almost as if though he had cut it from the Internet, cut and paste. Very complicated intellectualisation of certain philosophies.Willem Els (12:17.942)Yeah, yeah, I think it's just you can see this is a really disturbed boy. He was reaching out to us. He was… I'm not an expert in that field. But when we work… you pick that up, especially in the terrorism field. But what we see here is that in the first place, this boy being 15 years old, we see that he also was taken out of school for some time, so he's not with the same grade as his peers, and so on. So there seems to be a history of challenges with this boy. And at the end of the day, if you...if you allow them to continue with this and you don't pick up those signs, then it can go South very, very, very fast. So if you look at these type of incidents, sorry, Chris, and I'm just going to refer to the Columbine…nere, because he started off with his own sort of, and you can see that… was his writing. And then he went into philosophies and even took all of those heavy philosophy. You can see that was cut from the Internet. And then he went into his ideology, where he's coming, those that he glorified. And there it came in, these glorification of the Columbine shooters. Now, I think it was 1999 or 98, there were two boys that actually took weapons and stuff to the school and they killed 14 of their fellow students and teachers, and then they killed themselves. So he glorified them in his Manifest, and he said that he wanted to be remembered like them.Willem Els (14:19.406)So that is a clear indication of where he's coming from and why he was doing what he was doing. And then, of course, he referred to being bullied. He referred to being, yeah, not a very good family life, et cetera, et cetera. But it was more of a revenge. This guy was mad at the world….for treating him the way that it treats him and this is his way out. And he says in his Manifesto, he says he wants to be remembered like the two guys from the Columbine shooting. And that is very alarming. Chris Steyn (14:55.101)Hm, and he said he wrote: “I'll be a God, at least”Willem Els (15:00.226)That's it. That's it.Chris Steyn (15:02.249)So Willem, is this your classical Lone Wolf profile?Willem Els (15:06.174)…you've got different profiles on them. You can have a Lone Wolf that has been radicalised from a terrorist organization, but he's not part of a cell and he can follow the same route. He won't communicate a lot. The first thing you hear about it is when he actually perpetrates the attack or she. T…But this is your typical, if you look at your school shootings in America, had quite a few of them. And he also glorified in this, he glorified that he said that the Columbine shooting leads to hundreds of shootings in America of school shootings. I don't know if there were hundreds of them, but that was his perspective. So yeah, I think it is very close to that profile, and it is something that our parents should be looking out for. If you've got a troubled child..parental oversight should be there, and especially if you pick up the danger zones, like what was mentioned in this case, it is very, very, very important that we keep our children safe.Chris Steyn (16:11.357)And how would you advise parents to try and establish whether their children had gone over to the Dark Side, literally, the Dark Web?Willem Els (16:20.972)Yeah, you know, I'm a parent myself and you know your child. If you've got a very good relationship, good cordial relationship with your children, you will pick up the danger signs of that. They will start to... Okay, most children when they go into teenage years, they want to be in the room and alone and so on. But it is very important that you keep a tab, keep engaging with them, et cetera, et cetera. And also, the Internet traffic. There must be a way that if you suspect something, that you can monitor that because, like I said, all of these things are so, it's on the Internet, it's all over the internet, not even on the Dark Net. It is on the open Google. You can find a lot of these things, but just a caution on that. With most of those recipes and things that you have on the Internet, or method, one of the ingredients, for instance, or they don't give you the whole picture. So children should really watch out. If they want to go in that, it is not safe. It is really not safe because, for instance, like I mentioned with the temperatures, if you don't mix it at the right temperature, you can blow up yourself and you can die. And it is not always in the recipe on the internet. So be very cautious. Do not do that because at the end of the day, you might end up like that young boy that we picked up…Chris Steyn (17:48.735)Thank you. That was Willem Els of the Institute for Security Studies giving BizNews viewers the latest on the Ballito Bomb plot. Thank you so much, Willem. I'm Chris Steyn for BizNews on the NdB Sunday Show..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.