In the middle of
air maxes last week, a woman who claimed her name was Hanan al-Samawi, a 22-year-old engineering student, walked into the U.P.S. office in the upscale Hadda neighborhood of Sana, Yemen’s sprawling capital city. She displayed a photocopied identification card, and dropped off a bomb hidden inside a printer cartridge with a Chicago address listed as the package’s destination. A few blocks away, another package concealing a homemade bomb was dropped off at a FedEx office, also seemingly headed to Chicago. Within days, the two packages had advanced through four countries in at least four different airplanes — two of them carrying passengers — before they were identified in Britain and Dubai after an 11th-hour tip from Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service set off an international terrorism alert and a frantic hunt. The foiling of the package plot was a significant success in an era of well-publicized intelligence breakdowns and miscommunications. It was also a sobering reminder to officials around the world that quick response to timely intelligence rules the day. Despite the billions of dollars governments have spent on elaborate airport technology to guard against terrorism threats, the packages would probably have been loaded onto planes bound for the United States, but for the Saudi tip. But the plot also points up holes in the system, particularly the security of cargo flights, that have already caused criticism abroad and are likely to rekindle new debates in the United States. In Qatar, officials acknowledged Sunday that one of the packages had been carried on two Qatar Airways passenger planes, apparently having eluded the airline’s cargo screening system. In Britain, officials were embarrassed about how long it took the authorities to identify one of the packages as a carefully concealed bomb. American and Yemeni officials still
UGG Amelie Sandals have little hard evidence about who was involved in the thwarted attack. On Sunday officials in Yemen discovered that Ms. Samawi’s identity had apparently been stolen, and that she was not the same woman who dropped off the packages. Ms. Samawi was released on bail on Sunday, and the authorities in Yemen have thus far arrested no other suspects. It was one more piece of a carefully designed and cleverly disguised plot that investigators believe was conceived by Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen, the group that American officials say might pose the most immediate threat to American soil. In television appearances on Sunday, John O. Brennan, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, said that American and British authorities were leaning toward the conclusion that the packages were meant to detonate in midair, en route to their destinations in Chicago. If that turns out to be the case, it would be a rare attack aimed at the air cargo system — one of the foundations of the global economy — rather than the passenger system, which has received the most attention from governments working to avoid a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. For the most part, governments around the world had bet that it was less likely that the cargo system would be the target of attacks, given that its flights carry few passengers. “It is time for the shipping industry and the business community to accept the reality that more needs to be done to secure cargo planes so that they cannot be turned into a delivery systems for bombs targeting our country,” Representative Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement. Congress in 2007, in legislation proposed by Mr. Markey, mandated that all air cargo be inspected before it is loaded onto passenger planes, setting an August 2010 deadline for
UGG Handbags the requirement. But as of the deadline, only about 65 percent of the cargo headed to the United States on passenger planes from abroad is inspected — and a far smaller proportion coming to the United States on all-cargo flights is physically checked, as these planes are not subject to the mandate. Even when the cargo is checked, air carriers in certain countries use equipment like X-ray detection devices or a visual check by an airport worker that often cannot identify packages with bombs, because the small amount of explosive material can be carefully hidden inside a routine electronic device, like a computer printer. Interviews in Washington, London and the Middle East reveal how the two bombs made their way through several countries before the tip from Saudi intelligence officials caused them to be pulled from airplanes.