A Cheetah armored vehicle is tested in South Carolina in 2007
This doesn’t happen very often:
1. An Iraqi made IEDs during the most violent years of the conflict.
2. One of his bombs may have killed four members of the Pennsylvania National Guard in 2005.
3. The bomb-builder, Waad Ramadan Alwan, somehow managed to come to the U.S. as a refugee in 2009.
4. He was arrested on terrorism charges in Kentucky last May and pled guilty in December. He could end up being fingered for the 2005 IED blast that killed Private 1st Class Nathaniel DeTample, 19, a student at Shippensburg University; Specialist Gennaro Pellegrini, 31, a Philadelphia police officer; Specialist Francis J. Straub Jr., 24, of Philadelphia, a UPS worker; and Specialist John Kulick, 35, a Pennsylvania firefighter and the father of a 9-year-old girl.
Reports the Philadelphia Inquirer:
…thanks to an FBI sting operation and the discovery of latent fingerprints on a six-year-old unexploded bomb, veterans of the stricken Guard unit hope that the Justice Department might have a lead on who set the blast.
An Iraqi citizen, arrested in Kentucky last year after entering the United States as a refugee, is on tape telling an informant that he planted bombs of the same type, in the same area, and in the same time period as the deadly strike against Alpha Company of the 1-111th Infantry.
Amazing, and all-too-rare, tale, if Alwan turns out to be the maker of the bomb that killed the Pennsylvania troops.