TWO WOMEN HAVE been arrested by police in Yemen in connection with parcel bombs that were found on cargo planes bound for the United States.
The devices, hidden inside printer cartridges, were discovered on two cargo planes in Dubai and Britain.
The women, a medical student and her mother, are being detained in the Yemeni capital Sana’a. The young woman, identified locally as 22-year-old Hanan al Samawi, was reportedly traced through a phone number left with a cargo company, the London Telegraph reports.
It has emerged that the packages were addressed to synagogues in Chicago. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu addressed the plot in a speech on Sunday, saying “We stand against a rising wave of terror”, and added that he plans to discuss with his American colleagues the steps that must be taken to fight the terror threat, The Jerusalem Post reports.
Meanwhile, the British government has confirmed its belief that the packages were designed to detonate mid-air and bring the planes down. British intelligence experts believe that the incident marks a shift in tactics used by terrorists to commercial targets, The Guardian reports.
The plot was reportedly foiled because of close cooperation between intelligence experts in Britain, the US, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The Guardian reports that US President Barack Obama called British Prime Minister David Cameron personally to thank him for the UK’s cooperation.
Speaking last night, Cameron said:
In the end these terrorists think our interconnectedness, our openness as modern countries, is what makes us weak. They are wrong – it is a source of our strength, and we will use that strength, that determination, that power and that solidarity to defeat them.
The devices were discovered only after a tip-off from Saudi intelligence, said the US homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitan:
This… started with good information from the Saudis. We were then immediately able to work with other countries, particularly the UK and the UAE, to segregate these packages, to begin the analysis about what they were, what they could have done.
US and British security officials believe Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born figurehead of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was behind the foiled attack.
The UK, USA, Germany, and France have all banned air freight from Yemen.
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