The United States and Britain have banned all cargo from Yemen, from where Al-Qaeda flew out mail bombs to kill Jews in Chicago. Germany banned both cargo and passenger flights from Yemen.
The U.S. government said Monday it has identified the leading terrorist suspect as 28-year-old Ibrahim Hassan Al-Asiri, believed to be hiding in Yemen. He also is linked to the attempt to blow up a plane bound for Detroit last Christmas and was behind an attempted assassination of a senior Saudi Arabia counterterrorism official.
U.S. deputy national security adviser John Brennan said Sunday that the United States is "at war with Al-Qaeda,” whose terrorists sent two bombs to kill Jews in Chicago, not coincidentally on the eve of U.S. elections and in the home state of U.S. President Barack Obama and outgoing Jewish White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who is running for mayor there.
“They are still at war with us and we are very much at war with them," Brennan told the "Meet the Press” television program. "They are going to try to identify vulnerabilities that might exist in the system." Brennan added that while there is no specific intelligence information pointing to more mail bombs from Yemen, he said it is possible. Brennan did not point out that the mail bombs were targeted at Jews.
The planned terrorist attack was prevented after Saudi Arabia tipped off the United States, basing its information on an Al-Qaeda terrorist who recently surrendered to the oil kingdom’s security authorities.
Security officials have described the bombing device as being very clever and almost impossible to detect by regular security screening. The two bombs were hidden in printer toner cartridges, a procedure that was bound to happen and will now become a standard procedure for the terrorists,” according to Professor Michael Clarke, director of the Royal United Services Institute and quoted by the London Guardian.
Explosives expert Roland Alford told the BBC that the explosive material known as PETN “is one of the most common explosives. It does not surprise me that they did not detect it in this case. But chemically, it is easy to detect.
“I think this time we were extremely lucky. These people are getting very inventive in the way they package improvised explosive devices.”