Anail bomb is an anti-personnel explosive device containing nails to increase its effectiveness at harming victims. The nails act as shrapnel, leading almost certainly to more injury in inhabited areas than the explosives alone would. A nail bomb is also a type of flechette weapon. Such weapons use bits of shrapnel (steel balls, nail heads, screws, needles, broken razors, darts and other small metal objects) to create a larger radius of destruction.
Nail bombs are often used by terrorists, including suicide bombers since they cause larger numbers of casualties when detonated in crowded places. Nail bombs can be detected by electromagnetic sensors and standard metal detectors.
The parents of a 25-year-old woman missing from a demolished Greenwich Village home where the police said a militant left-wing group was fashioning bombs made an impassioned plea to their daughter yesterday to disclose how many people were in the building at the time of the blast.
