In many of the videos he posted on YouTube, Alberto RH, alias Alberto HRom, 28 years old, began with an open-face speech in which he asked his 1.3 million followers for a small financial help, a donation, to finance what he was going to show them next. And this was nothing more than audiovisual content in which it explained, step by step, how to make explosive substances such as gunpowder or make a handmade flamethrower, as well as the destructive effects of all this. He even boasted that he could make explosive gummy bears.
Alberto RH, who claimed to have studied industrial engineering, was arrested on December 18 in the Cantabrian town of Castro Urdiales by agents of the Civil Guard Information Service. He is accused of four crimes, including illegal manufacturing of explosives and risk caused by explosives both for the tutorials he had published and for the dangerousness of his activities. Your videos on the internet.
It is youtuber cIt began a decade ago by broadcasting educational recordings about chemistry and physics on a channel titled “edutainment” in which it showed everything from how to make a wind turbine with a scooter to the steps to obtain biodiesel with used cooking oil. However, in recent years he had opened a second channel on this platform, also with great audience success, in which he showed his tutorials for making explosive substances. He charged subscribers three euros per month and admitted “patrons” for 10 euros per month. He had 1.3 million followers on the two YouTube channels and more than 300,000 on the social network Instagram.
Sources from the Civil Guard assure that the investigation has not revealed any other source of income or work activity of Alberto RH except that of his videos. The YouTube channel where he explained how to make explosives has been canceled (not the educational content channel), but some of his most viral videos are still available on other platforms spread by other users. Alberto HRom He has been released by order of the judge pending the conclusion of the investigation.
The one baptized as Operation Sputnik began in January 2022, after the armed institute detained a 22-year-old young man in Pontevedra for clandestinely manufacturing explosive substances. Among the computer material that was seized from that twenty-year-old – later sentenced to one year and six months in prison – several of Alberto RH’s videos appeared, from which he had been inspired to make the explosives. An investigation was then initiated to try to locate and arrest the man who appeared in those recordings.
According to sources close to the investigation, the agents analyzed the small details that appeared in the images. “The fact that the landscape was very green allowed us to conclude that they were recorded somewhere in northern Spain,” they explain. Subsequently, researchers discovered that in some videos a tall chimney similar to a blast furnace could be seen in the background, at quite a distance, as well as a wall with what looked like the emblem of a company.
This allowed us to focus the investigations in Cantabria and, later, on an agricultural property owned by Alberto RH’s family where, in addition to having the clandestine workshop where he prepared the explosive and incendiary mixtures, he recorded the videos in which he showed the effectiveness of its substances. In one of these recordings, the now detained man used more than 30 kilos of thermite, a pyrotechnic compound with high incendiary capacity that reaches temperatures of more than 2,500 degrees, making it capable of melting any type of metal. Although this substance is used legally for welding railroad rails, organized crime uses it to open holes in safes and vaults.
In the video, It showed, with several cameras recording from different positions, how he destroyed his own vehicle until he melted the engine and opened a gap in the bodywork. All of this “in the vicinity of a forest area of high ecological value, with the obvious risk of fire that this entailed,” underlines the Civil Guard in the note with which this Friday it reported his arrest. When he made that video, firefighters went to the scene alerted by the large smoke caused, but the now arrested man denied them access to the farm to put out the fire, which prompted a parallel investigation by the Nature Protection Service (Seprona). of the armed institute itself.
Telescopic sight shooting
In another video recorded on the same farm, the man explained step by step how to make napalm (a flammable substance made from gasoline) and a flamethrower with which to use it. In these images he demonstrates the effectiveness and scope of his homemade gadget. In a third recording, he appears filling a pumpkin with a substance and shooting it from afar, with a weapon with a telescopic sight, to cause it to explode.
In the two searches carried out after his arrest, the Civil Guard has seized more than 20 kilos of chemical substances that he had supposedly acquired through the Internet in other countries or in stores in Spain that laxly applied the current legislation on the control of the sale of precursors potentially usable for the production of explosives. In fact, to purchase these products, the buyer must have a professional license that Alberto RH did not have. Given the danger of the chemical products involved, the action of the Explosives Disposal Technicians (Tedax) of the armed institute was necessary to neutralize them.
So far this year there have already been six operations carried out by the Information Service of the Civil Guard against the illegal manufacture of explosives, although sources from the armed institute confess that this is the most relevant given the enormous diffusion that the videos made by the young man In this sense, those responsible for the investigation highlight that some of his followers were minors and that, although among the rest there were surely many curious people, they do not rule out that among them there were also members of criminal organizations and even potential terrorists.
