Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Local bomber boy a Canook
Great ... just great. And here I thought our Canadian Neighbors were the calm type.
- The 17-year-old Bucks County boy charged with having bomb-making equipment in his bedroom and threatening to blow up his school is a Canadian who hates Americans, prosecutors say.
Travis W. Biehn was ordered held at the county juvenile detention center Friday after Judge Kenneth G. Biehn — no relation — ruled the boy remains a danger to the community.
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Gibbons said Biehn created a Web page on which he posted photos of bomb-making materials displayed in his bedroom.
The Biehns reside at 3395 Gail Circle in Buckingham. During the search of the boy's home, Gibbons said, investigators found between 8 and 10 pounds of potassium nitrate as well as fuses and several small, empty canisters.
Gibbons said Biehn had enough explosive material to level his own home, but if he planned to use one of the canisters to house the bomb, the resulting explosion would have been relatively minor.
Still, she said, ''He was serious. He had everything he needed to make a bomb. It's not a complicated process. If he had used the complete contents of what he had, it would have been a major explosion. He would have leveled the house.''
Gibbons said police found Biehn's parents to be uncooperative during the search. Gibbons said she could not provide the first name of the boy's mother, but the woman harassed investigators as they searched the house.
''The mother was verbally interfering with the police officers. She said her son should not cooperate. The father was also not cooperative,'' the district attorney said.
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Potassium nitrate is commonly used as a fertilizer, but it has incendiary capabilities and can be employed to make a homemade bomb. Gibbons said quantities of the material were found behind a door in the boy's room that leads to an attic crawl space.
The chemicals were contained in FedEx boxes that had been addressed to Biehn, but there was no evidence in the boxes indicating where he obtained the chemicals. Gibbons speculated that the boy purchased the materials on the Internet.
Gibbons said it appears that some of the potassium nitrate and other materials are missing from the containers. Gibbons said police are searching for the missing materials, but she suggested that Biehn made a test bomb and may have set it off in a remote location.
''It could have been that he was practicing and that he went into an isolated area and set it off,'' she said.
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