US PRESIDENT Barack Obama yesterday said a totally unacceptable systemic failure led to a failed airline plot that almost caused the destruction of a Northwest flight headed for Detroit Metro Airport and vowed to identify the problems and “deal with them immediately”.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, is suspected of trying to ignite an explosive using a chemical-filled syringe as Northwest Flight 253 approached Detroit on Christmas Day.
The president said a preliminary assessment already had made clear there was a breakdown in the intelligence review system. “When our government has information on a known extremist and that information is not shared and acted upon as it should have been, so that this extremist boards a plane with dangerous explosives that could cost nearly 300 lives, a systemic failure has occurred and I consider that totally unacceptable,” he said.
The president said he has ordered government agencies to report back to him on Thursday about what happened and said he would “insist on accountability at every level”. The US must act quickly to fix flaws in the homeland security system, he added.
Meanwhile, Yemen has warned of hundreds more militants on its soil planning to attack the West and appealed for help to forestall more terror attempts after the failed plot.
Yemen’s foreign minister, Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, told the BBC up to 300 al-Qaeda-backed extremists were waiting to follow the example of Abdulmutallab, who obtained enough explosives in Yemen to have blown a large hole in the Northwest Airlines aircraft.
“Of course there are a number of al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen and some of their leaders. We realise this danger. They may actually plan attacks like the one we have just had in Detroit . . . I can’t give you exact figures. There are maybe hundreds of them, 200, 300,” he said.
The minister added that Britain, the US and other western nations could do “a lot” to improve Yemen’s response to militants on its own soil and it was the “responsibility” of developed countries with strong intelligence capabilities to warn Yemen about the movements of terror suspects.
“We need more training. We have to expand our counter-terrorism units and this means providing them with the necessary training, military equipment, ways of transportation – we are very short of helicopters,” he said.
Yemen’s appeal came as its government confirmed that Abdulmutallab visited the country twice in recent years – for several months in 2005 and again from August until shortly before his failed attempt to down the airliner on Christmas Day. Abdulmutallab has told FBI interrogators that he was trained in Yemen by al-Qaeda.
Abdulmutallab described Yemen as “great” in internet postings after visiting the country for the first time to learn Arabic while he was a boarder at an elite international school in west Africa.
His postings offered a picture of a lonely young man preoccupied with “jihad fantasises” long before he encountered Islamic radicals as a student in London.
In 300 postings between 2005 and 2007 on the Islamic Forum website, the teenage Abdulmutallab spoke of his feelings of isolation.
“Far from home, at a school with few Muslims; no one to consult, no one to support me and I feel depressed and lonely. I do not know what to do. And then I think this loneliness leads me to other problems,” he wrote.
– (Reuters/Guardian service)