Late Saturday evening, a car containing 100kg (220 lbs) of explosive compound was deposited in the outer parking lot of Lev Hamifratz mall in Haifa, Israel. The car was parked in a crowded section of the parking lot next to structural pilings holding up a portion of the mall, and the explosives were mixed with ball bearings to ensure maximum human and structural damage from the blast.
Further, “Had the car bomb exploded, the majority of the cars in the parking lot would have gone up in flames,” a police source told the Israeli press after the attack was prevented. “The gas in them could have exploded. This would have been a major terrorist attack.”
Fortunately, the terrorists hoping to cause massive carnage with this attack failed to wire and detonate their explosives properly. When the first portion of the bomb fizzled, a shopper who heard a minor explosion notified security, which found the vehicle and called in Sappers to disarm the explosive.
