Yemen jails student, mom over bomb plot

Dubai police say this photo shows parts of a computer printer that had explosives loaded into its toner cartridge. It was found on U.S.-bound flight.
Dubai police say this photo shows parts of a computer printer that had explosives loaded into its toner cartridge. It was found on U.S.-bound flight.

— Authorities in Yemen on Saturday arrested two women suspected of sending two powerful bombs on cargo planes bound for the United States, as the investigation into the terror plot continued to unfold on three continents.

The bombs concealed inside cargo packages were expertly constructed and unusually sophisticated, U.S. officials said Saturday, further evidence that al-Qaida’s affiliate in Yemen is steadily improving its abilities to strike on U.S. soil.

As investigators on three continents conduct forensic analysis of the two bombs and try to piece together a foiled terrorism plot, U.S. officials said evidence was mounting that the top leadership of al-Qaida-in-the-Arabian-Peninsula, including the radical U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, was behind the attempted attacks.

On Saturday, Yemeni officials announced the arrest of a young woman and her mother in connection with the plot. The two were not identified, but a defense lawyer who has been in contact with the family, Abdul Rahman Barham, said the younger woman was a 22-year-old engineering student in her fifth year at Sanaa University and that her mother was 45.

Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, said Saturday night during a news conference that Yemeni security forces had identified the younger woman based on a tip from U.S. officials.

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Investigators said the bomb discovered at the Dubai airport in the United Arab Emirates was concealed in a Hewlett-Packard desktop printer, with high explosives packed into an ink cartridge to avoid detection by scanners.

“The wiring of the device indicates that this was done by professionals,” said one official involved in the investigation, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry was continuing. “It was set up so that if you scan it, all the printer components would look right.”

The terror plot broke publicly Friday morning, when two packages containing explosives from Yemen and addressed to synagogues in Chicago were intercepted in Britain and Dubai, setting off an international dragnet and fears about packages yet to be discovered.

It also led to a tense scene in which U.S. military jets escorted a plane to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York amid concerns - which turned out to be unfounded - that there might be explosives on board.

On Saturday, in news conferences in London and Yemen, and from interviews with investigators in the U.S. and abroad, the contours of the investigation began to emerge, along with new details of the frantic hours leading to the discovery of the packages.

The U.S. officials said their operating assumption was that the two bombs were the work of Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, al-Qaida-in-Yemen’s top bombmaker, whose previous devices have been more rudimentary and also unsuccessful.

Asiri is believed to have built both the bomb sewn into the underwear of a young Nigerian who tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight on Dec. 25, and the suicide bomb that nearly killed Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief, Mohammed bin Nayef, months earlier.

As in the two previous attacks, the bomb discovered in Dubai contained the explosive PETN, said the Dubai police and Janet Napolitano, the U.S. secretary of homeland security. This new plot, Napolitano said, had the “hallmarks of al-Qaida.”

Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House homeland security intelligence subcommittee, said federal authorities indicated to him Saturday that the packages were probably intended to blow up the synagogues in Chicago rather than the cargo planes, which do not carry passengers. Based on a conversation with Napolitano, he said authorities were leaving open the possibility that other packages with explosives had not yet been found.

It was a call from bin Nayef, the Saudi intelligence chief, on Thursday evening to John Brennan, the White House senior counterterrorism official and former CIA station chief in Riyadh, that set off the search. Bin Nayef also notified CIA officials in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, the U.S. officials said.

Saudi Arabia has sometimes been a reluctant ally in America’s global campaign against radical militants. But Yemen, its impoverished next-door neighbor, is a different matter. The Saudis consider the al-Qaida branch in Yemen their biggest security threat, and Saudi intelligence has set up a web of electronic surveillance and spies to penetrate the organization.

The tips from the Saudis set off the frantic search for the bombs that eventually were tracked down in Dubai and at an airport 100 miles north of London.

Reviewing the evidence, U.S. intelligence officials said they believe the plot was probably blessed by the highest levels of al-Qaida’s affiliate in Yemen, including al-Awlaki.

“We know that Awlaki has taken a very specific interest in plotting against the United States, and we’ve found that he’s usually behind any attempt attack on American targets,” one official said.

This year, the CIA designated al-Awlaki - a U.S.

citizen - as a high priority for the agency’s campaign of targeted killing.

One official involved in the investigation said the package that was discovered in Dubai had a woman’s name and location in Sana, the Yemeni capital, on the return address. The package left Yemen on Thursday, the official said, where it was flown to Doha, Qatar, and on to Dubai.

Also on Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security dispatched a cable warning that the bombs may have been associated with two schools in Yemen - the Yemen American Institute for Languages-Computer Management, and the American Center for Training and Development - that were listed on the return address portion of the packages.

Security forces in Yemen were in a state of heightened alert Saturday, as investigators questioned cargo employees and shut down the FedEx and UPS offices in Sana.

Obama administration officials said they were discussing a range of responses to the thwarted attack. The failed attack on Dec. 25 created an opportunity for the White House to press Yemen’s government to take more aggressive action against al-Qaida operatives there, and some U.S. officials said they believe the conditions are similar now.

A thinly veiled campaign of U.S. missile strikes in Yemen this year has achieved mixed results. U.S. officials said several al-Qaida operatives have been killed in the attacks, but there also have been major setbacks, including a strike in May that accidentally killed a deputy governor in a remote province of Yemen. That strike infuriated Yemen’s president,Saleh, and forced a months long halt in the U.S. military campaign.

In recent months, the Obama administration has been debating whether to escalate its secret offensive against the al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen.

The CIA has a fraction of the staff in Yemen that it has in Pakistan, where the spy agency is running a covert war in the country’s tribal areas, but over the course of the year the CIA has sent more case officers and analysts to Sana as part of a task force with the military’s Joint Special Operations Command.

CARGO SECURITY

Experts said the mail bombs discovered aboard cargo jets in England and Dubai could very easily have ended up on passenger planes, which carry more than half of the international air cargo coming into the U.S.

And they caution that cargo, even when loaded onto passenger planes, is sometimes lightly inspected or even completely unexamined, particularly when it comes from countries without well-developed aviation security systems.

About 60 percent of all cargo flown into the U.S. is on passenger planes, said Brandon Fried, a cargo-security expert and executive director of the Airforwarders Association. New jumbo jets flying in from overseas - like the Boeing 777 - have “cavernous” bellies where freight is stored, he said.

Most countries require parcels placed on passenger flights by international shipping companies to go through at least one security check. Methods include hand checks, sniffer dogs, X-ray machines and high-tech devices that can find traces of explosives on paper or cloth swabs.

But air shipping is governed by a patchwork of inconsistent controls that make packages a potential threat even to passenger jets, experts said Saturday. Security protocols vary widely around the world, whether they’re related to passenger aircraft or cargo planes.

One particular vulnerability in the system: Trusted companies that regularly do business with freight shippers are allowed to ship parcels as “secure” cargo that is not automatically subjected to further checks.

Even where rules are tight on paper, enforcement can be lax. A U.S. government team that visited cargo sites around the world last year found a range of glaring defects, said John Shingleton, managing director of Handy Shipping Guide, an industry information service.

“They walked into a warehouse where supposedly secure cargo was,” he said, declining to say where that was. “Generally security is high, but if you think it’s perfect you’re kidding yourself.”

Cargo companies have long shipped on passenger airlines, for which cargo provides extra income. Passenger planes often carry the most perishable goods shipped internationally, like live seafood, fresh flowers and even human organs.

About 50,000 tons of cargo are shipped by air within the U.S. every day, according to the Transportation Security Administration. About 25 percent of that is shipped by passenger airlines.

Information for this article was contributed by Mark Mazzetti, Robert F. Worth, John F. Burns, Eric Schmitt, Liz Robbins, Al Baker and Angela Macropoulos of The New York Times; and by Gregory Katz, Samantha Bomkamp, Raphael G. Satter and Adam Schreck of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/31/2010

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