The explosive therefore could not have been drawn from any store or magazine in the United Kingdom, but must have been specially and illegally made or imported.

There's this attempt to try and demonstrate that the possession of the materials has no lawful purpose, and that's very much driven by the legislation at the time, drives a lot of the forensic investigations any, in any kind of case.

So he was really keen to demonstrate that this class of explosive and this particular type could not have possibly been lawfully in possession of anyone in the UK, and you'll see that a lot here because the, the, this type, uh, this lignin dynamite, um, wasn't licensed for any commercial purpose in the, in, uh, in the UK as well.

Um, but there's an interesting dichotomy there as well because, uh, on one hand he says it's not very, you know, it's not licensed for use, but he then also has to defend that it is still a dangerous explosive.

Um, uh, and so there's this point where he highlights in his analysis that actually, you know, uh, uh, at the bridge, uh, case, it's only about 20% nitroglycerin.

And you can see in cross-examination, he said, "Well, so it's, actually that wouldn't have destroyed the bridge then, would it?" He said, "Well, yes, but if it had been..." And what fascinates me there is i- in almost all of Majendie's work, you see something which if you pulled a report from the home office today, from the forensic explosive laboratory, you would see almost exactly the same language used.

One of the big differences though is that they wouldn't move into discussion of the engineering aspects of explosives, um, whereas Majendie goes pr- From explosives to chemistry, um, uh, to, uh, engineering, um, backwards and forwards in order to say, "Well, actually, you know, if this explosive had been this much of actual dynamite, not lignin dynamite, then it would almost certainly have caused that." Um, actually, I find myself qualifying the language because he doesn't say things like almost certainly.

According to Steve Johnson, the level of innovation in IED technology was significant because it raised questions at the time as to who might have been capable of such sophisticated engineering.