From Denver’s 7NEWS, a disturbing homeland insecurity report:

The FBI is contacting its Joint Terrorist Task Forces in Washington and around the country after 7NEWS Investigator John Ferrugia asked federal officials about hundreds of gallons of missing liquid propane gas.

About 100 propane gas cylinders have been stolen since July and so far, none of them has been recovered, Ferrugia said.

The missing tanks could pose a serious threat because the propane in just one of the cylinders can take down a small building.

The missing tanks are not the small cylinders people use on their barbecue, or the kind that would be stolen for meth labs. These are larger cylinders that contain liquid propane to power forklifts and for other commercial purposes.

But what’s disturbing is that, in a post-9/11 world, neither local law enforcement nor federal Homeland Security officials have been tracking this potential threat, Ferrugia said.

The commercial propane tanks weigh 33 pounds, contain 7.8 gallons of liquid propane…

More from the AP here, which ends with this not-so-funny paragraph:

Bob Fridlund, a plant manager for Mountain West Printing, said police did not seem concerned when he reported the theft of seven propane cylinders.

“I said ‘What are these people doing with these bottles? Are they going to make a bomb or something out of them?”‘ Fridlund said.

“And he just laughed at me and said he didn’t know,” he said.

It isn’t just what’s inside the containers that may be a problem. As Ken Timmerman noted in an Insight Magazine report last January on captured al Qaeda operative Marwan Ben-Ahmed in France:

In his apartment, police found packages of iron perchlorate and other chemicals which, when mixed together, can make a powerful explosive. They also seized two empty propane canisters, $5,000 in cash, fake passports and a computer with coded instructions. During a second search two days later, they found timers and detonators hidden in a washing machine. Police also arrested Ben-Ahmed’s wife and two accomplices, identified as Mohamed Merbah and Ahmed Belhoud.

But it was the discovery of a military-issue nuclear-biological-chemical (NBC) protection suit and bottles of toxic chemicals that most alarmed investigators, leading to speculation that Ben-Ahmed and his network were planning a chemical attack or had gained access to nuclear waste and were hoping to make a “dirty bomb” that would irradiate the greater-Paris area…

Osama bin Laden has spoken repeatedly of his desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction and to use them against the West. Two years before Sept. 11, 2001, the Arab press was ripe with speculation that he had gained access to 20 nuclear “suitcase bombs” that were feared to have gone missing from the stockpiles of the former Soviet Union. Bin Laden’s intentions never have been in doubt — only his capabilities. So when the French discovered the NBC suit in Ben-Ahmed’s tiny apartment in La Courneuve, they feared the worst and immediately ordered a thorough chemical analysis of every ingredient seized at the site.

In testimony the day after the arrests, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told members of parliament that Ben-Ahmed and his cell were in contact with another al-Qaeda operative named Rabah Kadri, arrested in London on Nov. 5 “on suspicion of planning a chemical attack” on the London subway system. Kadri eventually led them to Ben-Ahmed and his network in France. The French counterterrorist police arrested “19 persons in November alone who were working with terrorist services,” Sarkozy revealed. Because of the risk of a chemical attack, “it was better to arrest them sooner rather than later,” he added.

On Christmas Eve, the French suspicions were confirmed when police raided the Minguettes housing project outside the central French city of Lyons, where they found four more alleged al-Qaeda operatives along with lists of chemicals needed to make cyanide, the same chemical agent al-Qaeda networks were planning to use in London. They now believe Ben-Ahmed was planning to fill the propane canisters with a deadly poison gas in hopes of killing hundreds if not thousands of people and was coordinating his efforts with al-Qaeda cells in Britain and elsewhere.

The best-case scenario, according to the FBI, is that the tanks were stolen to power farm equipment. Sure hope so.

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