Can You Really Implant A Bomb In Someone’s Body?

Fictional terrorists have been doing it for years.

Our Movie Mythbusters series answers the age-old question, “Okay, but could that actually happen in real life?”

An Israeli soldier wakes in a darkened room, wracked with pain. There are stitches in his abdomen. He doesn’t realize it, but his Hamas captors have put him to sleep and surgically implanted a bomb in his stomach.

The soldier is later killed when Hamas detonates the bomb during a failed prisoner swap. This is the most horrific scene from the new Israeli drama “Fauda,” which follows a group of Israeli spies as they infiltrate Palestinian terror cells in the West Bank. There’s a similar scene in “The Hurt Locker,” which won an Oscar for Best Picture in 2010.

But is implanting a bomb in someone’s body anatomically possible — or merely a fictional construct that movies and TV shows use to create drama?

Let’s find out.

To date, there hasn’t been a 100% verifiable case where an implanted bomb successfully detonated. But terrorists have come pretty close.

In 2008, for example, Al Qaeda tried to blow up a US plane in Iraq with bombs implanted in two dogs. The dogs died — apparently of complications from having had shoddy surgery performed on them — and when American soldiers investigated their deaths, they found the bombs, foiling the plot.

A year later, Abdullah al-Asiri — one of the most wanted members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — surrendered to Saudi intelligence chief Muhammad bin Nayef. But Al Asiri had a secret — he was a human bomb. The explosive detonated, disintegrating Al Asiri from the waist down and projecting his leg up into the ceiling tiles. Miraculously, bin Nayef escaped without major injury.

Initial reports said the bomb had been surgically implanted in Al Asiri’s anal cavity, but later ones suggested that it may have merely been strapped to his body.

Asiri’s older brother was indeed working with doctors in Yemen to surgically implant bombs in humans and animals, according to a secret US intelligence report written in 2011 that was leaked to Newsweek. Unfortunately, the report didn’t say whether the extremists were successful in figuring out how to pull off such a shenanigan.

The TSA warned airlines and airports about the threat in a 2011 memo that was reported by The Daily Mirror. “Our Government has information indicating doctors have offered to help extremists surgically implant explosive devices in humans and animals for terrorist attacks,” the memo reportedly read.

But security officials point out many roadblocks to successfully implanting and using such bombs. First, you have to find doctors willing to break the Hippocratic oath. Second, the bomb can’t be implanted too deeply, or the body will absorb much of the blast. So it needs to be near the surface, making it easier to detect. As the Iraqi dogs proved, recovery from a backroom surgery isn’t guaranteed.

Experts agree that liquid or plastic explosives are the most likely materials that terrorists would use for body cavity bombs. But bombers would then need to inject a second chemical to set it off — which means getting a needle through customs. Bombs could alternatively be triggered by a cell phone call, but then a working cell phone must be implanted too.

So while a surgically implanted bomb might work in theory, it requires a lot of medical expertise, technology and time to be done right, and it appears that no one has pulled it off yet.

While “Hurt Locker” and “Fauda” are hyper realistic in many respects, the bombs implanted in their characters are still science fiction — at least for now.