TRACES of the easy-to-make but deadly explosive TATP – known as the “mother of Satan” – have been found in a house where the alleged attackers in the twin assaults in Spain were believed to be building bombs, police said today.

Used by jihadists everywhere from Paris and Brussels to the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, the dangerously unstable TATP has become the explosive of choice for the Islamic State group, which claimed the attacks in Barcelona and the seaside resort of Cambrils.

Investigators uncovered ingredients of the explosive at a house in the town of Alcanar, around 200km south of Barcelona, believed to be the terror cell’s bomb-making factory.

Police also found 120 gas canisters in the house the cell had used to prepare bombs for “one or more attacks in Barcelona”, regional police chief Josep Lluis Trapero told reporters.

But the suspects accidentally detonated an explosive at the house on the eve of Thursday’s attack in Barcelona – an error that likely forced them to modify their plans.

Instead, they used a vehicle to smash into crowds on Barcelona’s Las Ramblas boulevard as it was thronged with tourists, killing 13 people and injuring about 100.

Several hours later, a similar attack in the seaside town of Cambrils left one woman dead.  Police shot and killed the five attackers in Cambrils, some of whom were wearing fake explosive belts and carrying knives.

Discovered at the end of the 19th century by a German chemist, TATP is a homemade explosive created by mixing precise quantities of acetone, oxygenated water and sulphuric, hydrochloric or nitric acid – all of which are easily available in high street stores. 

Nail polish remover is essentially acetone, while oxygenated water is a commonly used disinfectant.

The mixture creates a coarse powder of white crystals that requires only a basic detonator to explode, triggering a huge blast of burning gas. 

Jihadists have set up entire labs – at first backroom affairs, but increasingly reaching industrial levels ­– to produce TATP and other explosive materials in Syria and Iraq.

The UK-based Conflict Armament Research monitor said in a report last year that 51 companies had supplied the components needed to make homemade explosives at semi-industrial levels to IS. 

The companies were spread across 20 countries, including Turkey and Russia, but also Belgium and the United States. 

Detonators can be made with a thin metal tube filled with paste and linked to two electric wires that will spark and trigger a flame when connected.  – AFP, August 20, 2017.