The Cedar-Riverside Explosion, Eight Years On

Early in the morning on New Year’s Day in 2014 I was looking through the online news, as was my habit. I came across an article about an explosion and fire in the Cedar-Riverside district of Minneapolis, which was suspected to have been caused by a gas leak. As I skimmed through the text, I noticed that the damaged building was said to be “next door to a mosque”. That got my attention — the blast must have been in “Little Mogadishu” — so I read the article more closely and looked at some of the news videos.

My suspicions were aroused by the appearance of the building after the explosion, before firemen brought the blaze under control. It didn’t look like a gas explosion, which typically blows out all the walls and collapses the roof onto the rubble. When that happens, most of the ambient oxygen is consumed by the initial blast, and there’s usually very little fire afterwards in the remaining rubble.

That’s not what happened on Cedar Avenue that bitterly cold New Year’s morning. An intense explosion blew out the windows of the second floor and propelled debris across the street (as well as the legless body of one of the victims, according to early reports that were later scrubbed from the web), but the walls remained intact. A fire burned fiercely afterwards, consuming all the flammable material in the building, including the roof. It took firemen a couple of days to extinguish the blaze completely.

I posted about A Fiery Dawn in Minneapolis on the evening of New Year’s Day. At that point Fire Chief John Fruetel told reporters that the cause of the fire was unknown. I was suspicious, and wrote: “If the FBI, ATF, or DHS turn up at the scene, we’ll know something’s going on.”

What happened next was very interesting. Early the following morning employees of the Department of Homeland Security did indeed arrive on the scene. The fire chief immediately changed his story, and said that investigators had determined that the cause of the explosion was a likely gas leak. This despite the fact that the building was still smoldering, and no forensic investigation had yet begun. Furthermore, any possibility of forensic investigation was foreclosed by the actions of the fire department, which demolished the building as soon as the last embers had been extinguished, all in the name of “safety”.

I wrote a number of posts in the next few weeks about the Cedar-Riverside explosion and the official cover-up of what happened. The full archive of links is here (including Seneca III’s careful analyses of the evidence of the explosion). On January 20 I compiled a summary of the investigation in “Ember Days”, and then in effect boxed up all the evidence and put it in the “cold cases” warehouse.

The fix was in. There was no way to learn the truth, and probably never will be, at least not in my lifetime.

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I bring all this up because a few days ago Vlad discovered a treasure trove of videos on an old hard drive. One of them was a news report from New Year’s Day of 2014 that he uploaded to one of his long-deleted YouTube channels:

Eight and a half years later, the story of what happened (or might have happened) that morning in Cedar-Riverside has been consigned to the memory hole. After studying all the material and thinking about it, my best guess is that a terrorist cell was preparing a powerful explosive that detonated prematurely. The mosque next door was a known Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, with connections to ICNA, ISNA, CAIR, MAS, etc. The FBI most likely had a confidential informant in the group who would have been exposed if there had been any real investigation. Or maybe he was one of the fatalities in the blast.

The interests of DHS/FBI overlapped with those of the Muslim Brotherhood, which would obviously want to keep a tight lid on any evidence that might have surfaced in a real investigation. Hence the presence of Keith Ellison and Abdi Warsame at the press conference with Chief Fruetel.

In the end the building was razed and the rubble carted away, destroying any possibility of a real investigation. The official cover story was a “gas leak”, never mind the gas utility’s vehement insistence that their monitoring equipment showed definitively that their system experienced no leaks whatsoever that morning.

A gas leak dunnit. The media could then forget the incident, and move on to more important things, like the winner of the Rose Bowl or the release of Bruce Springsteen’s new album.

For readers who are interested in more details about the Cedar-Riverside explosion, I’ve included excerpts from “Ember Days” below the jump:

Just after dawn on New Year’s Day, a catastrophic fire broke out in the “Little Mogadishu” district of Minneapolis. The blaze began when an explosion blew out the windows in an upstairs apartment, propelling window frames and plywood debris into the street. The resulting fire sent flames twenty feet above the roof and took two days to extinguish. The bodies of two victims were found in the burned-out building, and a third man died later in the hospital.

News about the fire and explosion appeared briefly in the national media, and reporting on the incident continued through Friday in the local Twin Cities outlets. It faded over that weekend, and the story never really resumed the following week. Since that time it has all but disappeared. The two most recent media items were an announcement that a benefit will be held for the victims of the fire on January 24, and a report that four of the victims remain hospitalized.

The latter article makes this laughable assertion:

The cause of the fire that destroyed the Otanga grocery and displaced residents from the apartment above remains under investigation.

The cause of the fire is not being investigated, because it can’t be investigated: all the meaningful evidence was destroyed when the fire-damaged building was demolished less than seventy-two hours after the explosion occurred.

I’ve been following the news of this incident since shortly after the explosion, and I’m forced to conclude that some or all of the following crimes were committed, and are still being committed. There may be others; I’m not a legal expert:

  • Official malfeasance
  • Dereliction of duty
  • Obstruction of justice
  • Destruction of evidence
  • Misprision of multiple felonies
  • Conspiracy

It’s hard to determine who might be guilty of these offenses, but the list of suspects moves beyond Minneapolis city officials and up into the rarefied region inhabited by agencies of the federal government, including the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

These crimes were committed regardless of what caused the explosion. Even if the cause of the fire was a natural gas leak, or a malfunctioning propane heater, or an exploding can of deodorant, justice was obstructed and evidence was destroyed. There was a blatant attempt to deflect any meaningful investigation of what did cause the explosion, and the destruction of the relevant evidence ensures that the cause of the fire will never be determined with any certainty.

For more information on the explosion and fire in Cedar-Riverside, Minneapolis, on New Year’s Day 2014, see the Cedar-Riverside Explosion Archives

3 thoughts on “The Cedar-Riverside Explosion, Eight Years On

  1. Just like how all the evidence from the destruction of the WTC was hurriedly disposed of and conveniently sent to China to be melted down before a proper forensic investigation could take place, or the rapid bulldozing of the remnants of the globalist Georgia Guidestones. Although in the latter case I suspect it has more to do with the high likelihood the destruction was caused by one of the numerous antitank weapons that were foolishly sent to Ukraine and have now found their way back to country that made them.

  2. Accidental house-fires (without a gas leak) do not start with an explosion. The sheer intensity of the blaze suggests the presence of incendiary or accelerant materials.

  3. Only July 4th, 2022, large groups of “youths” ran wild in Minneapolis shooting large fireworks and guns at cars, pedestrians and buildings. Much of the mayhem was withing a couple of blocks of where I work. These “youths” were, of course, all Somalian. Our local news media didn’t even *hint* that they were Somali. They are the most protected class in the city.

    That large building in the background of your pictures has a twin, and they are both almost exclusively infested with Somalians – and paid for by taxpayers. There was a large fire in one of them a couple of years ago. I don’t think that it was a bomb-making mistake. I’d bet that someone tried to light a campfire in their living room. They’re not assimilating very well to modern living.

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