On the 27^th of August this year a member of the well-known terrorist group al Qaeda tried to ass-assinate - the mother of all puns is in there, you’ll understand shortly - the Saudi deputy Minister of the Interior, Saudi Prince Muhammad bin Nayef bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud.

The prince was slightly injured in the blast, while the suicide bomber,

Abdullah al-Asiri was blown into 70 pieces. Under the pretext of handing himself over to Saudi counter-terrorist authorities, al-Asiri was allowed close enough to the minister to detonate his bomb.

But isn’t it a little strange that a former terrorist, now allegedly turned good guy was allowed close to anyone with a bomb strapped to his body? Well, according to recent reports, the bomb was not actually on his body, but rather in it: al-Asiri is most likely the first suicide bomber equipped with a butt bomb.

So al-Asiri most likely stuffed enough explosives up his ass to blow himself into many, tiny pieces. But it doesn’t stop there. The reports say that the bomb was most likely activated when the prince was tricked into dialing a number that supposedly belonged to another terrorist. This means that al-Asiri not only was stuffed with explosives, he also had a cell phone hidden in his colon. Let’s hope it wasn’t a Nokia Communicator.

The good news here is that when you have explosives inside your body it will take most of the force from the explosion, hence the 70 pieces al-Asiri puzzle. The bad news is that the amount of explosives you can stuff up your butt (the colon is about 25 cm long) is enough to create some serious problems if it detonates inside a pressurized container, like, let’s say, an aircraft.

You probably see where this is headed, yeah?

Back in 2006, when a terrorist plot to blow up airliners with liquid explosives was foiled by UK police, it got damn hard to get even a bottle of water on to an airplane. Now al Qaeda has proven that they are able to conceal a bomb inside their own bodies and actually detonate it.

As a joke I’ve said that some day we’ll all have to strip naked before we’re allowed to fly. Now we might not be too far away from airport security ass probing. Personally, I’ll rather take the train.

You can read more about this incident at Times Online and Homeland Security Today.