Warning issued after 2 dozen homemade hand grenades seized from Birmingham 'factory'
By Carol Robinson | crobinson@al.com
ATF officials have begun to see a growing danger in Alabama: Homemade hand grenades.
They are manufactured in the Birmingham metro area, made with faulty fuses and live explosives, and pose a grave danger to the public and law enforcement.
"We're not sure exactly how many are out there yet," said David Hyche, ATF's assistant special agent in charge in Alabama. "We know we recovered 24 that were in the process of being made. We know that hand grenades had been sold in the City of Birmingham to an illegal alien drug trafficker. So if they'll be sold to that guy, they'll be sold to anybody."
The investigation began about two months ago when Birmingham police narcotics investigators and Drug Enforcement Administration agents found what appeared to be a hand grenade during a drug raid. ATF agents were brought to the scene, and deemed the grenade live. Experts dismantled the device, and found a homemade fusing system that Hyche described as somewhat unique.
Eventually, the probe led lawmen to a factory where someone was making the grenades. It was in a residential neighborhood in the Birmingham area, but Hyche said he can't yet release more because the investigation is ongoing and arrests are pending. They recovered spoons, strikers, springs, pins and fuse assembly parts.
"Today we wanted to get that information out there to the public because we're afraid these things, no we know these things, will not function as designed,'' Hyche said. "I don't want people trusting their lives on something that somebody made in their garage and they have no training or expertise."
"Homemade fuses most likely, at best, will have no delay, and, at worst, will go off when you don't want them to,'' he said. "The kill radius on a hand grenade is about 10 meters, or 30 feet."
Souvenir hand grenades are commonly sold at gun shows and surplus stores, and those devices with holes in the bottom obviously pose no threat. Hyche said, however, those to fear are the grenades where the hold has been patched, sanded and painted. Those seized by ATF had been designed to have a three to five-second delay, according to the manufacturer. "That three to five-second delay translated to about a millisecond when we remotely detonated some of these,'' he said. "They had gone to painstaking attempts to manufacture a delay, but there was no delay."
Not only did investigators find the remanufactured grenades, but also homemade machine guns. These weren't semi-automatic guns being altered into fully automatic guns, but machine guns made from scratch. "There is no serial number, no way to trace them at all except we recovered the tools he was using to make them,'' Hyche said. Agents recovered three of those machine guns.
"We know what we've gotten off the street and we know what we got when executed a search warrant on the grenade factory,'' Hyche said. "Today we're appealing to law enforcement to let us know if you've recovered anything similar."
Hyche said they have no knowledge that grenades have been used in any recent crimes here. "Maybe none have been sold, but I think that's naïve,'' he said. "We have information this group of people was not only selling the hand grenades, but also the firearms to illegal aliens, drug traffickers, anybody with cash."
In Mexico, Hyche said, the grenades are widely used by rival drug gangs. "If you're using these things to protect your drugs or you're targeting someone else, the odds that you throw the thing further than the length of your hand are pretty slim," he said. "I'm telling you, the junk don't work."
The maximum penalties for manufacturing or possessing the grenades is 10 years in federal prison, which means no possibility of early parole. "We will do everything we can to get the maximum penalty,'' Hyche said.
Just last year, the suspects in the mass shooting in San Bernardino threw pipe bombs out of the window at the police officers chasing them. In 2013, the Boston Marathon bombing suspects threw two pipe bombs filled with BBs at lawmen pursuing them. Hand grenades could be used in much the same way. "It's not far-fetched. It's not just in the movies,'' Hyche said. "These are some of the things police officers have to think about among hundreds of other things every day."
"My message is they're going to kill people,'' he said. "There are going to be unintended targets. They could be law enforcement. They could be firefighters. They could be kids. These are indiscriminate weapons that kill anybody."