Two teenagers were charged with hurling an improvised explosive device at Gracie Mansion during a violent protest on Saturday afternoon, with law enforcement sources close to the case saying the homemade bomb was packed with “Mother of Satan”, a volatile explosive favoured by international terrorists.“Anything can set it off, heat, friction, impact. It’s cheap, hard to detect but highly unstable,” one law enforcement source told New York Post. “It’s a mixture of stuff found in common hardware and drug stores.
“You can get it pretty much anywhere, and it’s hard to detect,” the source said. “The downside is it’s very sensitive and unstable. If you drop it or something falls on the mixture, it will detonate.”The accused were identified as Ibraham Kayumi, 19, and Emir Balat, 18. Law enforcement sources close to the case told The Post that both had self-radicalised in recent years and travelled to Turkey and other terror-training hot spots.Balat spent more than three months in Istanbul last year, while Ibrahim flew to Istanbul and Saudi Arabia in 2024, and made a trip to Melbourne, Australia in 2019, the sources said.The pair admitted to police after they were arrested at the demonstration outside the mayor’s residence that they had also watched ISIS videos and threw the bomb at right-wing agitators because they felt the agitators had insulted their religion, the sources said.The device consisted of sports drink bottles filled with triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, a substance favoured by terrorists and known as “Mother of Satan”, the sources said. They said the substance was so volatile that it typically did not require a fuse to explode.The explosive can be made using household ingredients readily available at home improvement stores and pharmacies, making it cheap to produce.“It’s designed to maim and kill,” one source told The Post. “This is just luck no one is dead.”The same type of bomb was used in high-profile terror attacks in France, the UK, Belgium and New Delhi over more than a decade, often with fatal consequences.The device did not explode during the clash between demonstrators backing right-wing activist Jake Lang and pro-Muslim counter-protesters outside Gracie Mansion.The incident took place during a planned anti-Muslim protest organised by Lang outside Gracie Mansion, which led to a confrontation with counter-protesters that quickly turned violent.Video footage showed several scuffles that led to six arrests, including the two accused of throwing the bomb.One of Lang’s supporters, Ian McGinnis, was accused of pepper-spraying counter-protesters and was charged with assault, reckless endangerment and unlawful possession of noxious matter, according to sources.Police and sources said the explosive device, a sports drink bottle filled with TATP and wrapped in construction tape, was hurled at Lang’s group during one of the confrontations.
