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Just 17 MINUTES from disaster: How ink cartridge jet bomb was defused just in time
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 3:22 PM on 4th November 2010
One of the two mail bombs sent from Yemen last week was defused just 17 minutes before it was set to explode, France's interior minister revealed this morning. But Brice Hortefeux refused to say whether it was the bomb pulled off a UPS plane at East Midlands Airport or if it was the device discovered in Dubai.
Investigators found the bombs wired to mobile phones. The communication cards had been removed and the phones could not receive calls, making it likely the terrorists intended the alarm or timer functions to detonate the bombs, U.S. officials have said.
A cartridge which was contained in a parcel intercepted by Dubai security officials found in a package onboard a cargo plane coming from Yemen
The parcel included explosive materials hidden inside the ink cartridge and an electric circuit connected to a mobile phone SIM card.
They also revealed that each bomb was attached to a syringe containing lead azide, a chemical initiator that would have detonated PETN explosives packed into each printer cartridge. Both PETN and a syringe were used in the failed bombing last Christmas of a Detroit-bound airliner. The news comes after the Home Secretary admitted that the terror group behind the ink jet bomb plot is operating on the ground in Britain planning new atrocities.
Theresa May said the police and security services were engaged in an ongoing struggle against the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which is now working in the UK. And she spoke too of a second new threat to the country from young radicalised Britons being trained in Somalia to carry out atrocities when they return to Britain.
A Yemeni man walks past a branch of the US package delivery firm UPS in Sana'a where the parcels were originally posted.
In a speech filled with stark warnings, she revealed that one member of AQAP had already been arrested in the UK on suspicion of ‘planning a terrorist attack in the country’. The fanatic, who cannot be named for legal reasons, allegedly intended to cause mass murder by bringing down an airline with a suicide bomb.
Airline bomb plots have become a hallmark of AQAP, which was behind the attempt to bring down at least two cargo jets last week with devices packed with the powerful PETN explosive hidden inside printer cartridges. In her strongest remarks yet on the severity of the plot, Mrs May likened it to the Lockerbie Bombing, which claimed 270 lives in the skies and on the ground.
She told a London audience at the Royal United Services Institute: ‘The explosive device was deeply concealed in the cartridge of a printer and connected to a hidden power source in sections of a mobile telephone. ‘It could have destroyed the aircraft on which it was being carried, over the UK, over the U.S. or on the ground.
‘The specifics of this attack – notably the type of device and how it was concealed – were new to us. The principle of the attack – a device placed in unaccompanied baggage – was not. It bears some resemblance to the attack on Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in 1988.’
Home Secretary Theresa May spoke at the Royal United Services Institute in London yesterday about the threat to the country from young radicalised Britons.
Anwar al-Awlaki (right), who preached in Britain between 2002 and 2004, is believed to have orchestrated the ink bomb plot.
Mrs May used her first major speech on terrorism to spell out the growing threats the UK faced at home and abroad. She singled out the threat of radicalised young Britons – many of them of East African origin – being trained in Al Qaeda-linked camps amid the chaos in war-ravaged Somalia.
‘We know that people from this country have already gone to Somalia to fight,’ she said.
‘It seems highly likely, given experience elsewhere, that if left to their own devices we would eventually see British extremists, trained and hardened on the streets of Mogadishu, returning to the UK and seeking to commit mass murder on the streets of London.’ She also repeated warnings of the UK falling victim to a Mumbai-style attack, and confirmed that police would be given more firearms to combat the threat.
AQAP is considered particularly dangerous because it broadcasts propaganda in this country in the English language, often through the words of American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, whose words inspired the woman who stabbed Labour minister Stephen Timms. Al-Awlaki is a key Al Qaeda commander in Yemen, who is believed to have orchestrated the ink bomb plot and the Christmas Day bid by former British-based student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, to blow up a plane over Detroit. Al-Awlaki, 39, lived and preached in Britain between 2002 and 2004.
Intelligence officials say he is believed to have made the recruitment of young Britons and Europeans a priority. MI5 and MI6 fear a ‘second Al Qaeda front’ has formed in Yemen and Somalia alongside that in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Anti-terror investigators believe dozens of radicalised Somalis are already in Britain and many are feared to have received terrorist training in their homeland.
Security officials say there is evidence that some Somalis, who are now British citizens, have been returning home for instruction in camps run by the hardline Islamic Al Shahab. The lawless country is seen as an ideal training ground and the Somali Britons are termed ‘classic recruits’ who can travel freely in Europe on their UK passports.
