Was Ammar Ajar Wearing a Real or Fake Bomb?

In Netflix’s ‘iHostage,’ the actions of one man create havoc in the lives of many people. The man in question is Ammar Ajar, who walks into an Apple store in Amsterdam one day with guns and explosives. As he takes the place and its employees and customers hostage, he makes a demand of two hundred million euros in cryptocurrency. While a negotiator is put in charge to talk with him, the cops also try to find a way to get the hostages out of the building. Their main concern is that Ammar has a bomb vest and he is ready to blow it up if his demands are not met. In real life, Abdel Rahman Akkad, on whom Ammar Ajar is based, also did something similar, which put the entire police department on their toes. SPOILERS AHEAD.

Abdel Rahman Akkad’s Explosives Turned Out to be Harmless

It is one thing to hold a person at gunpoint and entirely different to blow up an entire building, which could cause the deaths of many people, both inside and outside the building. Hence, it was the threat of Akkad’s bomb vest that kept the authorities on edge and prevented them from taking any drastic steps. The primary focus had always been to get the hostages out first, but that had to happen without triggering Akkad because he could see them as a threat to himself and could blow up the building.

Eventually, Akkad came out of the building when the Bulgarian man he had been holding hostage found his opportunity to run. As the robber tried to catch his hostage, a cop car hit him, and he sustained fatal injuries. Still, he had the vest on, which meant the cops couldn’t go anywhere near him, lest he decide to blow them up in his last breaths. They also had to be careful because the impact of the car could have triggered a mechanism that could prove very dangerous for any person who approached an injured Akkad.

With this in mind, a robot was sent to check whether the criminal still had the bomb and, if so, how dangerous it was to be removed from his body safely. It turned out that the bomb vest wasn’t actually that dangerous. It was made of plastic explosives, which are often used by the defense forces for training purposes. This means that even if Akkad pulled the trigger, the only person he would have harmed would have been himself, and the building and the people inside it wouldn’t have to bear the brunt of his choices.

The harmlessness of the bomb also proves that Akkad’s intention was to fool the authorities into thinking he was dangerous and could do anything drastic. His focus was on getting the money by any means possible. A later investigation revealed that he had been having financial troubles with his business and had landed himself in quite a bind. Only a bag full of money could have solved his problems, and he saw the answer to all his dilemmas in holding the Apple store hostage. He knew that he needed to have significant leverage to demand a sum like two hundred million euros from the cops, which is why he brought explosives along with guns. To the negotiators, the presence of the bomb vest meant that Akkad had already made up his mind to get the money or die trying. They believed that he was either going to leave with the money he wanted or not at all. This gave him an air of a dangerous person with nothing to lose, which is exactly what Akkad wanted them to believe. One can’t imagine what was going on in his mind when he thought about the outcome of his actions, if he thought about them at all, but there is a possibility that he didn’t really think about dying, which is why he didn’t bother getting real explosives and an armed bomb vest when he got the two guns to put his plan into action.

Read More: Where was iHostage Filmed? All Filming Locations of the Netflix Movie