Plane bomber was al-Qaeda - Obama
Saturday, 2 January 2010 19:02
US President Barack Obama said it appeared the suspect who tried to bomb a Detroit-bound plane over Christmas was a member of al-Qaeda and had been trained and equipped by them.
Offering a robust defence of his administration's counterterrorism efforts, Mr Obama said he received preliminary results of the reviews he ordered into air travel screening procedures and a 'terrorist watchlist system' and expected final results in the days to come.
Mr Obama had called for an immediate study of what he termed 'human and systemic failures' that allowed 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to get on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on 25 December, allegedly with explosives in his clothes.
In his weekly radio and Internet address, Mr Obama said: 'It appears that he joined an affiliate of al-Qaeda, and that this group - al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula - trained him, equipped him with those explosives and directed him to attack that plane headed for America'.
The president's comments were his most explicit to date tying the suspect with the al-Qaeda group.
He has come under intense criticism from Republicans, who accuse him of mishandling the incident and not doing enough to prevent attacks on the United States.
