Location and mass of explosive from structural damage

A methodology to determine the location and mass of explosive in a terrorism attack when the location of the crater is unavailable is presented in this paper and applied to the case of the AMIA (Israel–Argentina Mutual Association) building attack that occurred in Buenos Aires, Argentina in July 1994. A computational dynamic analysis was carried out over the congested urban environment that corresponds to the opposite rows of buildings of a block, in the same street. Many alternatives corresponding to different locations and explosive mass were simulated and the corresponding distribution of pressures and impulses which were used to evaluate, with the aid of isodamage curves, the distribution of damage on building facades for the different alternatives simulated and compare them with the real observed damage patterns. The methodology allows the determination of the most probable location of the focus of the explosion as well as the mass of the explosive used in the attack.