Forenote from Danny Haszard i put this under mental health instead of current affairs news for good reason
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Accused seller claimed to have a powerful device
Houston Chronicle, TX - 5 hours ago
... He also became a religious fanatic who was kicked out of his Jehovah's Witnesses group because his views were so extreme, she said. ...
May 25, 2005, 12:15AM
Experts doubt superbomb would work as promised
Accused seller claimed to have a powerful device
By HARVEY RICE and RENEE LEE
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
| AP Ronald Allen Grecula is set to return to federal court Thursday. |
Before his arrest, Ronald Allen Grecula, 68, of Bangor, Pa., described an explosive of tremendous power to undercover agents who he thought were affiliated with the al-Qaida terrorist group, according to court documents.
Grecula, who made an initial appearance Monday before a federal magistrate judge after his arrest Friday in Houston, told the agents he would sell them a bomb that could destroy everything within a half-mile with a force approaching a nuclear explosion, according to transcripts of the conversations in an FBI affidavit. Grecula is scheduled to return to federal court Thursday.
Experts who reviewed a transcript of conversations in which Grecula tries to describe the bomb to an undercover agent were doubtful that it could produce the powerful explosion he promised.
"I can't imagine that he has any sort of superbomb," said Robert Curl Jr., a chemistry professor at Rice University who shared the 1996 Noble Prize in Chemistry.
Grecula appears to discuss hydrogen and chlorine gas in a 1-foot diameter cylinder ignited by ultraviolet light, a combination Curl said would produce a mild explosion.
"If somebody was standing right next to it, it might kill them, maybe," Curl said.
Grecula also talked about fusion. "Fusion doesn't make any sense at all in this context," Curl said.
"This reads like somebody who is trying to get money. If he sold it to these folks, he'd have to hide out from them."
"This seems very farfetched," said R. Craig Jerner, head of J.E.I Metallurgical Inc. of Dallas. Jerner, who investigates industrial explosions, was skeptical about Grecula's claim that his bomb would hurl particles at 750,000 feet per second, or 500,000 mph.
"I'm not sure there are that many things that can travel at that velocity," Jerner said. "It's beyond anything I know about."
Sought a buyer
Curl said chemical reactions cannot produce the speeds discussed by Grecula.
"If I was going to make a bomb, this would be one of the last things I would choose to do," he said about using hydrogen and chlorine gas.
Grecula had asked an FBI confidential source to help him find a buyer for his bomb and also to find someone he could hire to kill his wife, Monique, who won custody of their two children, according to the FBI affidavit.
Monique Grecula said she was shocked when she learned from the FBI that her husband was arrested and accused of trying to sell a bomb. She said she doesn't think he made a bomb but has no doubt that he could probably make one.
She said that after the Oklahoma City bombing, he bragged to her and others that anybody could make a bomb like the one used to destroy the federal building there.
Monique Grecula's boyfriend, Manuel Mireles, said Ronald Grecula is a dangerous man.
"We were relieved when they arrested him," said Mireles from The Woodlands home he shares with Monique Grecula. "I can't believe this guy who was a danger to us is finally perceived as dangerous. At every level he is dangerous."
Mireles, who has been with Monique since she separated from her husband in 1999, said he thinks Ronald Grecula, with his engineering background, has the skill to make a bomb.
"I don't think he has made one, but he would try, and I think he is capable. He could easily erect a bomb," Mireles said.
Monique said she met Ronald Grecula in Paris in 1989. She was a 19-year-old college student, and he was a married businessman visiting the country. She said he wooed her with his charming ways, taking her to New York and the finest restaurants. They married in 1991 after he got a divorce.
She said about a year after their marriage he went through a depression. He had lost his landscaping business in Connecticut, and they moved to Florida to live in his father's house, she said.
''He couldn't find a job. I think he was going through a midlife crisis," she said. ''He was more depressed and violent. He hit me several times."
She said she left him in 1999 when she found out he also was hitting her son.
Ronald Grecula blamed the government for his bad fortune, and he began talking constantly about the end of the world and militia, she said. He also became a religious fanatic who was kicked out of his Jehovah's Witnesses group because his views were so extreme, she said.
Wife feared for her life
She is still legally married to Grecula. She said he was never served divorce papers because he would move to different locations.
She said she has not completed the divorce because she and Mireles are in debt from the costly search to find her children whom Grecula kidnapped in 2000, taking them to Malta.
She said her husband made her fear for her life. Now that he is in custody, she said she feels safer but not completely safe.
Mireles said Ronald Grecula. once came at the couple with a 13-inch blade knife.
He said the couple moved to The Woodlands from Pennsylvania two years ago when Ronald Grecula was released from a Malta prison, where he served time for abducting the children.
Ronald Grecula returned to Pennsylvania, and the couple did not feel safe living in the same area, Mireles said. "We viewed him as a serious threat," he said.
He said the couple had no contact with Ronald Grecula until two months ago when he called asking to see his children, Berenger and Emilie, now 14 and 7.
"He said he was in Houston, and we were floored he was that close," Mireles said.
Ronald Grecula was granted a few supervised visits with the children. He later stopped coming as often, saying he was too busy because he had business in Philadelphia and England and had a friend in Dallas, Mireles said.
"He claimed something big was going to happen, and he was going to make a lot of money," Mireles recalled.
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Good read:The "BOMB" 