Al Qaeda Probed After Attempted Airplane Bomb

US authorities on Sunday said they are going to look into whether al Qaeda had anything to do with the attempted airplane bombing on Christmas day in Detroit.

Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly has ties to Yemen, said officials, whom say he told them he had ties to al Qaeda there.

A Guardian report said:

Yesterday it emerged that after attending university in London, the 23-year-old had dropped out of a postgraduate business course in Dubai, telling his family he had gone to Yemen to study Islam. He then cut off contact with them.

Repercussions from the failed Christmas Day plot continued yesterday, with Barack Obama ordering a review of US security as politicians demanded to know how the British-educated Nigerian was able to get on the plane after his father, a wealthy banker, had been concerned enough to warn US diplomats that his son might be a security risk.

Obama’s spokesman said he was seeking answers to why Abdulmutallab was placed on the least urgent of three US watchlists of possible terrorism suspects, rather than a higher category which would have prevented him flying.

The Dept. of Homeland Security said that Abdulmutallab was probably not part of a larger plot orchestrated by al Qaeda and that they have terrorist security on lockdown. Al Jazeera said:

US media cited officials saying the suspect in Friday’s incident had told interrogators that al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen had given him the equipment and instructions on how to carry out the attack.

Abdulmutallab was on the US Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) security watch list, which includes about 550,000 people.

However, the Nigerian was not on the smaller Terrorist Screening Data Base (TSDB) and was not flagged for mandatory extra airport security screening or included on the “no fly” list.

The Nigerian nationa was the son of a former Nigerian banker and government minister, said the Financial Times:

His father, Umaru Mutallab, was a government minister in the 1970s, and was until this month chairman of the board of First Bank, one of Nigeria’s top three financial institutions, for 10 years. During that time he presided over the bank’s rapid expansion both in Nigeria and abroad.

Dora Akunyili, the information minister, told reporters in Lagos that Mr Abdulmutallab had been living outside Nigeria for some time. He had entered the country on December 24, and left the same day, she said.

She said that his father, whom she described as a “responsible and respected Nigerian with a true Nigerian spirit”, had earlier reported his concern about his son’s activities to the US authorities.