Yemen bomb ’17 minutes from detonation’
British officials have told Channel 4 that they have seen “nothing to back up the claim” that one of the two parcel bombs defused in the East Midlands and Dubai was just 17 minutes from exploding.
France’s Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux told French television today that “one of the packages was defused only 17 minutes before the moment that it was set to explode”.
The 17 minute claim is all the more worrying given that the bomb found in Dubai had flown on two passenger airliners via Doha from Yemen before it was seized. It is not known how many passengers were on board the planes.
British police at first failed to find the bomb at East Midlands airport, which was hidden in the toner cartidge of a computer printer. The UK authorities were only alerted to the device’s existence after a tip-off from Saudi intelligence.
If either device did come so close to exploding, that would represent a possible propaganda victory for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the group widely believed to be behind the foiled attack.
The device discovered in the UK is currently being investigated at a government laboratory at Fort Halstead in Kent. It is understood that both bombs had been pre-set to go off with a mobile phone alarm clock acting as the timer. The packages were addressed to Jewish synagogues in Chicago, but British officials believe the bomb maker did not have access to flight schedules and could not have known precisely where the bombs would have gone off.
German officials have revealed that both devices contained between 300 and 400 grammes of PETN, four times more explosive than was discovered on Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian caught on a plane to Detroit last Christmas Day.
American officials have said they cannot confirm the French Interior Minister’s claim because the US has yet to conduct its own independent analysis. One official in Washington said that experts in the UK and United Arab Emirates had not yet worked out when the timers were set to go off.
The White house press secretary Robert Gibbs said the question of when the bombs would detonate was still under investigation and that he could not confirm such a close call. A security source in the United Arab Emirates said that the 17 minute claim was not an accurate description of the device found there.