Worthy News: Yemen bomb 'defused just in time'

Friday 5 November 2010

Yemen bomb 'defused just in time'

Photo released by Dubai police of what they said was printer containing ink cartridge loaded with bomb - released 30 October 2010

Police in Dubai said this printer sent from Yemen contained a bomb

One of the two parcel bombs intercepted last week after being sent from Yemen was defused 17 minutes before it was due to explode, France's Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux has said.

Mr Hortefeux was speaking to France-2 television but did not reveal his source for the information.

The two bombs were being sent via air freight to the US but intercepted in Dubai and the UK and defused.

Investigators have focused on a Yemen-based al-Qaeda offshoot.

The group, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), has said it was behind the parcel bomb plot.

Security forces in Yemen are hunting for suspected bombmaker Ibrahim al-Asiri, who is suspected of being behind last year's failed 25 December attempt to bomb a US airliner and other attacks.

The bombs were found after a tip-off from Saudi authorities and were pulled off US-bound cargo planes in England and Dubai.

They were made of a difficult-to-detect explosive called PETN, and concealed within printer cartridges inside larger packages.

German officials have said the bombs contained 300-400g of PETN, more than enough to cause a large explosion.

Both bombs were wired to circuit boards from mobile phones but did not contain the SIM cards needed to receive calls, US officials have said. This indicates the phones were to be used as timers.

US officials also said packages intercepted in September that were linked to AQAP may have been a dry run for last week's bombs, as the bombmakers could trace the route and timings of the packages delivery on the freight companies' websites.

How the plot emerged:

Device 1 intercepted at East Midlands Airport in the UK. It was posted via UPS in Yemen and is believed to have been flown via Dubai and CologneDevice 2 intercepted in Dubai after flying on two Qatar Airways passenger jets from Yemen. It was posted via freight firm FedExBoth devices are addressed to synagogues in Chicago, and contain PETN explosives stuffed into printer cartridgesOther UPS cargos are searched in Newark, Philadelphia and New York as the alert spreadsThe UK government later says it believes Device 1 was designed to go off on board the plane

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