IED Explodes, Kills One in... Vegas?

Let hope that what happens here, stays here:

One man was killed and another person escaped injury Monday in an explosion of a small device left atop a vehicle outside a Las Vegas Strip resort, authorities said.

Police said the blast was not a terrorist act, but an apparent murder of a hotel employee.

"We believe the victim of this event was the intended target," said Officer Bill Cassell, a Las Vegas police spokesman, who called the victim an employee of the Luxor hotel-casino. The person who narrowly escaped injury was also a hotel employee, Cassell said.

I'm admittedly late to this story, and rather thankful I am, otherwise, I might have erroneously reported with other media and bloggers the apparent pre-mature detonation of a backpack bomber. I don't hold any of the bloggers commenting on this case responsible for the erroneous reporting, which seems to be a case of the professional media once again trying to rush out a story before actually having the facts of the incident verified.

This was, if the second round of reports is accurate (and the second round of reporting is generally more accurate than the first, if still often imperfect), most likely a targeted assassination, and not a terrorist with a case of premature detonation.

Using explosives is a rather rare method of carrying out an assassination, precisely due to the threat of unwanted collateral damage.

The KTLA account of the detonation linked by Allah is particularly frightening if accurate, in that it describes the device detonating as the apparent target attempted to move it.

It could be that the device was command-detonated and that the bomber chose that exact moment to detonate the bomb, but the other possibility is that the bomb had a motion-activated trigger. This means that anyone else who may have attempted to move a device so armed (from a hotel security officer to an opportunistic thief, to a "good Sam") could have been killed.

I've sent in an info request to the ATF Arson and Explosives Division seeking clarification of what kind of trigger they have recovered, but considering that the answer would reveal part of an on-going investigation, I don't anticipate any sort of a response.

Update: Averill P. Graham, US DOJ, writes back this morning to state that the correct way of requesting information is a dead-tree FOIA request. Frankly, I'm not that interested.