Global General

Mail bomb in Dubai flew on passenger planes

(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-10-31 22:52

U.S. officials said suspects in the plot include the bombmaker suspected of designing the explosive used in the failed Christmas airliner bombing. The bombmaker is a key operative in al-Qaida's offshoot in Yemen, Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

"They are a dangerous group," Brennan said of al-Qaida in Yemen "They are a determined group. They are still at war with us and we are very much at war with them. They are going to try to identify vulnerabilities that might exist in the system," he said.

He said the U.S. "will destroy that organization as we are going to destroy the rest of al-Qaida."

Authorities were also looking at two language institutions in Yemen the plotters may have been associated with.

It still was not clear whether the bombs, which officials said were wired to cell phones, timers and power supplies, could have been detonated remotely while the planes were in the air, or when the packages were halfway around the world in the U.S.

Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula took responsibility for the failed bomb last Christmas that used PETN, an industrial explosive that was also in the mail bombs found Friday.

The suspected bombmaker behind the Christmas Day attack, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, is also the prime suspect in the mail bomb plot, several U.S. officials said. Al-Asiri also helped make another PETN device for a failed suicide attempt against a Saudi Arabia's counterterrorism chief last year. The official survived, but the attacker died in the blast.