Thwarted al-Qaida bomb plot linked to US drone strike operation in Yemen

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/08/al-qaida-bomb-threat-us-drone-yemen

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The disruption of an alleged al-Qaida plot to attack a US-based jet using using a so-called "improved" underwear bomb has been linked to a suspected US drone strike in Yemen at the weekend.

Two Yemeni members of al-Qaida were killed by a missile strike on their car on Sunday in what is believed to have been a drone strike by the US.

On Monday, the White House said authorities in the Middle East had seized an improved underwear bomb within the last 10 days.

Representative Peter King, chairman of the US House homeland security committee, said on Tuesday he had been told the drone strike was part of a larger effort to intercept a more advanced "underwear bomb".

King told CNN: "I was told by the White House that they are connected, that they are part of the same operation." King and US security officials did not say what happened to the suspected suicide bomber or if he was killed in the strike. "The person who actually had the bomb is no longer a threat," King said.

John Brennan, President Barack Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser and a former CIA official, told ABC's Good Morning America that authorities are "confident that neither the device nor the intended user of this device pose a threat to us".

US officials have said the plot was detected in its early stages and that no American airliner was ever at risk. The FBI is conducting forensic tests on the bomb as a first step towards discovering whether it would have cleared existing airport scanning systems.

Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic senator for California who heads the Senate intelligence committee, gave an early hint when she said that she had been briefed about the device which she called "undetectable".

Just how major an escalation in threat is posed by the bomb remains unclear. Security sources have told news agencies that it was a step up in levels of sophistication, particularly in its use of a more refined detonation system, and Brennan said "it was a threat from a standpoint of the design".

But the Associated Press quoted an unnamed US official as saying current detection methods probably would have spotted the shape of the explosive in the latest decvice.

The device was intercepted within the last 10 days, and was described as the product of successful international co-operation between the US and its partners. The focus is on al-Qaida's offshoot, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, and speculation that the intelligence work was likely to have been done by Yemeni authorities possibly backed up by Saudi Arabia.

In public, Yemeni officials said they had no knowledge of the plot. "We have no information on the attempted bombing the US authorities have spoken of," an official in Yemeni president Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi's office, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.

Matthew Levitt, a counter-terrorism expert at the Washington Institute, said that the interception of the plot amounted to a significant achievement for US security agencies. He said: "The FBI is holding the device, which suggests that this was done by having boots on the ground. This was a sophisticated operation that shows we are making in-roads in serious places."

Levitt, who was involved as a senior analyst in the FBI's investigation into 9/11, said that it was natural to be sceptical in a presidential election year about security announcements. "But this was not political, it didn't come from the White House and my sense was that it was a really unique success," he said.

Levitt said that the spotlight would now be even more intense on Ibrahim Hassan al Asiri, AQAP's assumed bomb-making chief, who is thought to be hiding out in Yemen. Al Asiri is believed to have been the creator of the Detroit underwear bomb as well as explosives that were packed into printer cartridges bound for Chicago in 2010.