24 Jul 2012 10:31 AM EST

-by Alex Mangini, Staff Writer; Image: The apartment of James Holmes (Image Source: NewsOne)

According to local law enforcement officials, the suspect in last Friday’s mass shooting at the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colo., had booby-trapped his apartment with upwards of 30 homemade grenades and 10 gallons of gasoline in hopes of killing or significantly injuring anyone who entered.

An unnamed local police officer in Aurora told CNN that bomb squad members found the apartment of 24-year-old University of Colorado graduate student James Holmes to be minimally furnished and armed with grenades wired to a control box in the kitchen.

“Imagine that fireball ... you would have an explosion that would knock down the wall of [nearby] apartments,” the official said. “That flame would have consumed the entire third floor [of the apartment complex].”

“By the time a fire truck would have arrived, they would have arrived to a building that would have been completely consumed in flames,” he added.

The official also claimed that the setup was similar to the IEDs usually reserved for Iraqi streets.

“It looked like spaghetti,” he explained.