Vialls was a self-proclaimed private investigator dedicated to exposing media disinformation, and made many claims in his reports disputing official explanations for events. The website thewebfairy.com wrote a comprehensive report, rebutting Vialls' claims regarding the crash of
American Airlines Flight 77 into
the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. The rebuttal centred mainly on Vialls' comparison of the Pentagon crash with an incident in which an Israeli El Al 747-200F cargo plane, flight 1862,
crashed into a 12-story apartment block in the
Amsterdam suburb of Bijlmer on 4 October 1992. He also disputed the official explanation for the bombings of the
Australian embassy and
Marriott Hotel in
Jakarta, Indonesia's capital. Vialls asserted that the explosives that authorities claimed were used in the Indonesian bombings were not powerful enough to have caused the damage and casualties that resulted. He claimed to demonstrate from photographs of the aftermath of each of the bombings, compared to the photographs taken in Northern Ireland where a 1,000 pound IRA bomb did not leave a crater or strip concrete from buildings, that a "micronuke" from Mossad's
Dimona research and development facility in the
Negev desert had been used. Vialls claims a device similar to the smallest United States nuclear weapon known as the
Davy Crockett or M-388 round, a version of the
W54 warhead, a very small sub-kiloton fission device, was used in the attacks. The Mk-54 weighed about 51 lb (23 kg), with a selectable yield of 10 or 20 tons, which Vialls claimed was consistent with the damage inflicted in Bali and elsewhere. A complete Mk-54 round weighed 76 lb (34.5 kg). One criticism of Vialls' theory was the absence of any radiation in Bali after the explosion. Vialls explained this flaw by arguing that
Geiger counters cannot effectively detect
alpha radiation, the most likely radiation to be present after the detonation of a plutonium fission bomb, since alpha particles are large and do not penetrate the walls of the Geiger-Muller tubes adequately enough to register radiation. Indonesian Muslim cleric
Abu Bakar Ba'asyir told Australia's ABC radio that he believed Vialls' theory regarding the first Bali bomb was a correct one. ==Death==