US authorities charged a 23-year old Nigerian man with trying to blow up a Detroit airliner on Christmas Day, and officials said the suspect told them he had obtained explosive chemicals and a syringe that were sewn into his underwear from a bomb expert in Yemen associated with al Qaeda. The authorities have not independently corroborated the Yemen connection claimed by the man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was burned in his failed attempt to bring down the airliner and is in a hospital to Michigan. But a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation said on Saturday that the suspect’s account was “plausible” and that he saw “no reason” to discount it.
Abdulmutallab’s name was not unknown to US authorities. His father, a prominent Nigerian banker, recently told officials at the US Embassy in Nigeria that he was concerned about his son’s increasingly extremist religious views. As a result of his father’s warning, authorities in Washington opened an investigative file and Abdulmutallab’s name ended up in the American intelligence community’s central repository of information on known or suspected international terrorists.
Members of US Congress who were briefed on Saturday by governmental officials also pointed to a Yemeni connection. “The facts are still emerging, but there are strong suggestions of a Yemen-al-Qaeda connection and an intent to blow up the plane over US airspace,” said Jane Harman, a California Democrat who leads the House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence. In an affidavit filed in support of the criminal charges, the authorities said that Abdulmutallab had tried to ignite a device, which was attached to his body, resulting “in a fire and what appears to have been an explosion.”
The affidavit said the device contained PETN, also known as pentaerythritol, a highly explosive substance that was used in 2001 by Richard C Reid, the so-called shoe bomber whose attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight was also thwarted. Officials said analysis of the remnants of Abdulmutallab’s device was being carried out by the FBI laboratory, but it was possible that had the chemical mixture detonated, it might have brought down the aircraft. The suspect’s name was inserted last month into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or Tide. About 550,000 individuals are registered in the database. A subset of that is the Terrorist Screening Data Base, or TSDB, which has about 400,000.