United States and United Arab Emirates officials are said to be rethinking the causes of a plane crash in the UAE in September, in which a UPS jet carrying batteries was downed. Officials say that no evidence of a bomb was found, but a report on Channel 2 Sunday night said that, given the revelations that Al-Qaeda terrorists tried to send bombs to Jewish institutions in the United States via overnight parcels, experts are investigating the terror angle in September's crash. The UPS plane had made several stops in Middle Eastern countries before leaving the UAE for Europe. It was to have flown to the U.S. after stopping in Germany.
Right now we're making sure that we look at possible other events or other developments that might have some relationship with the most recent packages that we've discovered.
In an official statement, the UAE's General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) said that it “has concluded that there was no presence of acoustic evidence or any forensic signature supporting the detonation of an explosive device” in the crash of the UPS plane on September 3. The plane was on its way to Cologne, Germany, when it crashed into a military facility in Dubai. The pilot had reported smoke in the cockpit right before the crash. Despite the statement, the GCAA said it was continuing its investigation.
But on the CNN “State of the Union” interview program Sunday, John Brennan, who is a White House special counter-terrorism expert, said that the U.S. was “closely looking” at the September crash in light of the new developments. Brennan, in a follow up question on the September crash after discussing the parcel bomb plot with CNN's Candy Crowley, said that “right now we're making sure that we look at possible other events or other developments that might have some relationship with the most recent packages that we've discovered.”
Brennan added that he believed – and hoped – that the current threat was over. “We are working with the intelligence that we have. We feel as though we've stopped all of the packages that have come into the United States that were originating in Yemen.” However, he said, there was no guarantee that other packages would not be found. “The Yemeni authorities have cooperated to date. I really hope that cooperation continues. So we're trying to make sure that if there are other packages out there, that we're able to find them before they're able to be detonated,” he added.
Speaking on Army Radio Sunday morning, an Israeli security official said Sunday that the explosive parcels found over the weekend in Britain and Dubai would not have made it onto the plane in Israel. “Already from the early 1970s our security officials realized that we had to check commercial cargo, not just travelers, hand bags, and luggage,” Pini Schiff, the head of security at Ben Gurion Airport, told Army Radio. “You have to pay attention to all aspects of a plane's preparation in order to ensure that it can take off and arrive at its destination safely.”
The packages discovered over the weekend were found in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and in Britain, and had been cleared for shipment to Jewish institutions in Chicago. According to the U.S. Transport Safety Administration, at least 38% of cargo coming into the U.S. was not screened for security The two largest international parcel shippers, UPS and Fedex, ship nearly 25 million packages a day between them, according to TSA officials.