DESTINATION PARADISE: INSIDE THE MIND OF A SUICIDE BOMBER

摘要

On 27 September 2017, a visit of the US Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis, to Kabul prompted a concerted attack on the airport using mortar rounds and suicide bombers. Previously, in March of the same year, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives at a police checkpoint at the entrance to Dhaka's Shahjalal International Airport. And in 2016, Istanbul's Ataturk and Brussels' Zaventem airports were also targeted by suicide bombers. As a consequence, landside security measures have been brought to the forefront of the discussions on airport security measures, the testament of which is the upgrading of Annex 17's recommendations on 'measures relating to the landside' to standards. Members of certain national security agencies with roles in the protection of airport premises are, in addition, trained to detect the 'signs7 of a potential suicide bomber. While these measures help mitigate the symptoms, in order to truly address the plight, as an industry and as a society we should endeavour to understand what makes a person become a suicide bomber.