Al-Qaeda terror plot against Jewish institutions in US foiled

02 November 2010

Yemeni security officials have arrested a female university student and her mother in connection with the dispatch of two packages addressed to several Jewish institutions in the Chicago area and seized last week onboard US-bound cargo plane in England and in Dubai. The arrest was made on Sunday in the Yemeni capital Sana'a after security officials detected the girl’s cell phone number on the two suspected parcels sent to the United States, the ‘Yemen Observer’ reported. Security officers ordered the international shipping companies Fedex, UPS and DHL to close their offices in Sana’a. Twenty-six parcels from the Fedex and UPS offices were seized and several of employees detained for questioning.

Yemen has also put the US-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki on trial in his absence. News of Awlaki's trial came as it emerged that in September, US intelligence officials intercepted parcels of books, papers and CDs that had been shipped to Chicago from Yemen and considered the possibility that they might have been test runs for terrorist attacks.

Now, intelligence officials believe that the shipments, whose hour-by-hour locations could be tracked by the sender on the shippers' websites, may have been used to plan the route and timing for the two printer cartridges packed with explosives that were sent from Yemen and intercepted in Britain and Dubai on Friday, the ‘New York Times’ reports. When US counter-terrorism agencies received information linking the first packages to the terrorist network Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), they stopped the shipments in transit and searched them, officials said. They found no explosives, and the packages were allowed to be delivered to what appeared to have been ''random addresses'' with no connection to the terrorist group in Chicago.

The apparent test runs may have permitted the plotters to estimate when cargo planes carrying the doctored toner cartridges would be over Chicago or another city. That would conceivably enable them to set timers on the two devices to ignite explosions where they would cause the greatest damage. One of the officials said that when the US intelligence agents had received a tip from Saudi intelligence officials last week that bombs might be on cargo flights to Chicago from Yemen, analysts had ''recalled the incident and factored it into our government's very prompt response''.

On Monday, Britain, France and Germany said they had banned all cargo shipments from Yemen, following a similar move by the US. London prohibited passengers from carrying printer cartridges aboard flights and Germany halted passenger flights from Yemen as well.

Meanwhile, Yemen announced charges had been brought against Awlaki, accusing him and two other men of plotting to kill foreigners and of being members of al-Qaeda. The charges against were announced in his absence as part of the trial of Hisham Assem, who is accused of killing a Frenchman in an attack in early October. No evidence has been made public linking Awlaki to the printer cartridge bombs, but intelligence officials believe that he played a role in the alleged failed bombing of a Detroit-bound aircraft in December 2009.

Awlaki, believed to be hiding in Yemen's mountains, has publicly called for more attacks on the United States. The British newspaper ‘The Guardian’ reported that a gifted student convicted of attempting to stab to death a former British government minister was inspired by Awlaki’s internet sermons.

A US official said that the addresses on the packages in the foiled attacks last week were outdated addresses for Jewish institutions in Chicago. The addresses are one reason that investigators now believe the plan may have been to blow up the aircraft, since there were no longer synagogues at the Chicago locations. US counter-terrorism officials said they were taking a new look at the crash of a United Parcel Service cargo plane in Dubai in September in light of the plot now uncovered. An initial investigation of that crash and on-board fire, in which the two pilots died, found that there was no evidence of an explosion.

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