PRESIDENT BARACK Obama has vowed to track down all those behind an attempt to bring down a US airliner on Christmas Day, confronting criticism that he had slipped up on national security.
"We will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable," Mr Obama said, interrupting his year-end vacation in Hawaii to assure Americans that his administration was doing all it could to ensure security after a Nigerian man managed to smuggle explosives onto a Detroit-bound flight.
"The American people should be assured that we are doing everything in our power to keep you and your family safe and secure during this busy holiday season," he said.
Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (23) is charged with attempting to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane as it approached Detroit on a flight from Amsterdam with almost 300 people on board.
Abdulmutallab has told US investigators that al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen supplied him with an explosive device for the attempted December 25th attack and trained him on how to detonate it, officials said.
Mr Obama said the US reaction would be forceful. "We will continue to use every element of our national power to disrupt, to dismantle and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us, whether they are from Afghanistan or Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, or anywhere where they are plotting attacks against the US homeland," the president added.
In a worrying development for US security, officials have since discovered that Abdulmutallab's father warned them of his son's growing radicalism.
But this information failed to prevent him travelling to the United States.
Mr Obama said that as a result of this oversight, he had ordered a thorough review of the screening process.
"We need to determine just how the suspect was able to bring dangerous explosives aboard an aircraft and what additional steps we can take to thwart future attacks," Mr Obama said.
A wing of al-Qaeda claimed responsibility yesterday for the failed Christmas Day attack on the US-bound passenger aircraft.
In a statement posted on Islamist websites, the group al- Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula said the attempt was to avenge US attacks on them in Yemen. It said it had provided the Nigerian suspect in the failed airliner bombing with a "technically advanced device" but that it did not detonate because of a technical fault.
Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the homeland security committee, yesterday said the US had a growing presence in Yemen which included Special Operations, Green Berets and intelligence. - (Reuters)
Bomb suspect: family said they warned authorities
UMAR FAROUK Abdulmutallab’s family said yesterday they had contacted international security services to raise concerns that he had been radicalised by Islamist extremists after he disappeared about two months ago and cut off contact with them.
His father, Umaru Mutallab, a former Nigerian government minister who recently retired as chairman of the First Bank group, “reported the matter to the Nigerian security agencies about two months ago, and to some foreign security agencies about a month and a half ago, then sought their assistance to find and return him home”, the statement said.
The statement did not say where Abdulmutallab (23) had been, although it emerged yesterday that he had dropped out of a postgraduate business course at the Australian University of Wollongong in Dubai in July this year, after about seven months, telling his family he had gone to Yemen to study Islam. – (Guardian service)