LAGOS, Nigeria — A young Nigerian man who purportedly tried to bring down a trans-Atlantic flight broke off contact with his worried parents only a few months before the attack, apparently trading a world of wealth for the calling of a jihadist.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab abruptly told his family he would abandon the life that took him from a $25,000-ayear private school in Togo to a degree at an illustrious London university. That message pushed his father, a prominent banker from Nigeria’s Muslim-dominated north, to contact state security officials and later the U.S. Embassy in hopes of someone bringing home his missing son.
“We provided them with all the information required of us to enable them do this,” a family statement read Monday, without elaborating.
Instead, the family said they awoke to news of the attempted Christmas Day attack on the Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight carrying 279 passengers and 11 crew members.
His family’s wealth made Abdulmutallab an educated Nigerian expatriate, and he continued to travel after he purportedly turned to extremism. The 23-year-old told U.S. officials who arrested him that he had sought extremist training in Yemen. Nigerian officials said the man’s roundtrip plane ticket was bought on Dec. 16 in Accra, Ghana,for $2,831 in cash, presumably by Abdulmutallab.
Abdulmutallab gradua t e d f r o m U n i v e r s i t y College London in 2008 before headingto Dubai and later cutting ties with his family. Loved ones back home struggled to understand his actions.
“From very early childhood, Farouk, to the best of parental monitoring, had never shown any attitude, conduct or association that would give concern,” the family’s statement read.
A university campus in Dubai said Monday that the young man had been attending the school from January through the middle of this year.
Raymi van der Spek, vice president of the University of Wollongong in Dubai, said Abdulmutallab took classes for “about seven months” before leaving the Australian public university.
From August until early December, Abdulmutallab was in Yemen, where he had received a visa to study Arabic at a school in Sana, according to a statement from the Yemeni Foreign Ministry.
Citing immigration authorities, the statement said Abdulmutallab had previously studied at the school, indicating it was not his first trip to Yemen. Authorities there “are currently investigating who he was in contact with in Yemen, and the results of the investigation will be delivered” to U.S. officials, the statement said.
It’s also a mystery what Abdulmutallab did over the eight days - including his birthday on Dec. 22 - after his ticket to Detroit was bought. On Dec. 24, Abdulmutallab reentered Nigeria for only one day to board a flight in Lagos, local officials said. He walked through airport security carrying only a shoulder bag, with explosives hidden on his body, they said.
In a statement released to reporters Monday, the family said Abdulmutallab’s father, Umaru Abdulmutallab, reached out to Nigerian security forces about two months ago. The father followed up with officials at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, a month and a half ago.
“We were hopeful that they would find and return him home,” the statement read. “It was while we werewaiting for the outcome of their investigation that we arose to the shocking news of that day.”
A Nigerian police spokesman declined to comment, while officials with Nigeria’s State Security Service could not be reached for commentMonday. A spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja said he had no information on the father’s efforts.
The family promised to cooperate with Nigerian and U.S. authorities.
“We, along with the whole world, are thankful to almighty God that there were no lives lost in the incident,” the statement read. “May God continue to protect us all, amen.” Information for this article was contributed by Adam Schreck and Ebow Godwin of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 9 on 12/29/2009