SANAA, Yemen, Oct 31, (Agencies): One of two powerful bombs mailed from Yemen to Chicago-area synagogues traveled on passenger flights within the Middle East, a Qatar Airways spokesman said Sunday. The US said the plot bears the hallmarks of al-Qaeda’s offshoot in Yemen and has vowed to destroy the group.
The airline spokesman said a package containing explosives hidden in a printer cartridge arrived in Qatar Airways’ hub in the capital Doha on a flights from Yemen — an Airbus A320 which can carry up to 144 passengers.
It was then shipped on a separate Qatar Airways plane to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where it was discovered by authorities late Thursday or early Friday. A second, similar package turned up in England on Friday.

The airline spokesman disclosed the information on condition of anonymity in line with the company’s standing policies on conversations with the media.
The plot was the latest to expose persistent security gaps in international air travel and cargo shipping nearly a decade after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and showed extremists appear to be probing those vulnerabilities.
“The security gap is now for things leaving Yemen,” said Riad Kahwaji, head of the Dubai-based Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis. “On the Yemeni side, they’ll have a lot to answer for to regain their credibility.”
Yemeni authorities have taken several people into custody for questioning, including a young student whose telephone number was used to register the packages. She has since been conditionally released into her father’s custody.
In Washington, President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser John Brennan said authorities “have to presume” there might be more potential mail bombs like the ones pulled from planes in England and the United Arab Emirates.

US inspectors were heading to Yemen to monitor cargo security practices and pinpoint holes in the system. An internal report, obtained by The Associated Press, said the team of six inspectors from the Transportation Security Administration will give Yemeni officials recommendations and training to improve cargo security.
“We’re trying to get a better handle on what else may be out there,” Brennan told NBC’s “Meet the Press” as he made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows. “We’re trying to understand better what we may be facing.”
Brennan noted that because of the continuing threat, the world’s largest package delivery companies — FedEx and UPS — have suspended air freight from Yemen.
The explosives, addressed to Chicago-area synagogues, were pulled off airplanes in England and the United Arab Emirates early Friday morning after intelligence officials were tipped off about them, touching off a tense search for other devices.
The package that was stopped in London was nearly caught when it passed through the UPS hub in Cologne, Germany after police there received a tip-off, said German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere Sunday.

By the time German officials received the tip, however, the package was already en route to Britain, and they had to alert their British colleagues.
Germany has now stopped all package deliveries from Yemen.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said he believes the device was intended to detonate on the plane, while Home Secretary Theresa May said the bomb was powerful enough to down the aircraft.
A US official and a British security consultant said Sunday that the device in England nearly slipped past investigators even after they were tipped off, suggesting it was sophisticated enough to escape notice.
Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, called it “a very sophisticated device, in terms of how it was constructed, how it was concealed” and said it was a viable device.
“They were self-contained. They were able to be detonated at a time of the terrorists’ choosing,” Brennan said, adding that officials are trying to determine whether the planes or the synagogues were the intended targets.
Qatar Airways said the explosives could not have been detected by X-ray or bomb-sniffing dogs and would not have been discovered without the intelligence tip-off.

Al-Qaeda’s offshoot in Yemen is suspected of mailing the bombs. The group was behind a failed bombing on a Detroit-bound airliner last Christmas that bore some of the same hallmarks as this plot.
Yemeni police late on Sunday released Hanan al-Samawi, 22, a female computer engineering student suspected of mailing the packages. She was detained Saturday after her telephone number appeared on one of the packages.
Police said the release was conditional and she could still be taken in for further questioning.
According to a Yemeni security official, at least five other suspects have been arrested and interrogated since Saturday over who might be behind the mail bombs and a number of employees of the shipping companies, including two from FedEx, are being investigated.
Yemen is also asking for more information from Saudi Arabia, which the US said provided the tip-off which thwarted the bombing.
Yemeni officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation unfolding on three continents.

US officials said suspects in the plot include the bombmaker suspected of designing the explosive used in the failed Christmas airliner bombing. The bombmaker is a key operative in al-Qaeda’s offshoot in Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
“They are a dangerous group,” Brennan said of al-Qaeda in Yemen “They are a determined group. They are still at war with us and we are very much at war with them.”
He said the US “will destroy that organization as we are going to destroy the rest of al-Qaeda.”
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula took responsibility for the failed bomb last Christmas that used PETN, an industrial explosive that was also in the mail bombs found Friday.
Brennan said forensic analysis indicates that this bombmaker also constructed the devices used in the failed bombing on a Detroit-bound airliner last Christmas and the attack on Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism chief last year, Brennan said.

US intelligence officials believe the suspected bombmaker is a Saudi named Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, living in Yemen.
Saudi Arabia said al-Asiri recruited his brother for a suicide attack against the counterterrorism chief, attaching the bomb to his groin or placing it inside his body. The official survived.
Brennan said the person who assembled these devices is “clearly somebody who has a fair amount of training and experience and we need to find him and we need to bring him to justice.”
The US was already on the lookout for a mail bomb plot after learning terrorists in Yemen were interested in “exploring an operation involving cargo planes,” a US counterterrorism official said.
US authorities then acted quickly after receiving a tip “that suspicious packages may be en route to the US” — specifically Chicago — the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
Brennan also said that in light of the bombs found Friday, the National Transportation Safety Board and terrorism investigators were re-examining the UPS cargo jet that crashed in Dubai in September.
Investigators in the United Arab Emirates said Sunday there was no evidence that an explosion caused that crash.

Security
Authorities at Kuwait International Airport have enforced the highest level of security precautions, a ranking official affirmed on Sunday.
The security measures at Kuwait airport are at the highest level and there is full coordination among the air facility authority, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and the Interior Ministry as well as other relevant departments for safeguarding the security at the airport, announced Minister of Communications and Minister of State for National Assembly Affairs Dr. Muhammad Al-Busairi.
The national security personnel had undergone top-grade training to deal with such situations, he said, in response to a question about the national-level procedures vis a vis the currently unfolding issue of the suspected booby-trapped packages, tied to the notorious group, al-Qaeda.
There has been a flurry of reports regarding the case, which prompted security authorities worldwide to be on alert fearing possible terror attacks by the clandestine group.
Yemen has not received any official demand from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states or other Arab states on halting air cargoes against the backdrop of recent packages incident, a Yemeni official said Sunday.
Undersecretary of the Public Authority of Civil Aviation Mohammad Abdulrahman Abdulqader said in a statement — on the sidelines of his participation in the Doha Aviation Summit that started Sunday — that the US asked other countries not to receive any shipment coming from Yemen against the backdrop of the recent incident, though Yemen did not receive any official request from the Arab countries in this respect.

Students
Students at Sanaa University protested on Sunday against the arrest of a colleague suspected of involvement in sending explosive packages bound for the United States.
“The Sanaa University student union ... believes the girl is innocent and has been wronged. We are calling for her release,” said union president, Ridhwan Massoud, 30.
Dozens of students staged a sit-in in the courtyard of Sanaa University’s engineering faculty. Yemeni officials had said the woman was studying medicine, but students at the university said she was in her final year of a computer science degree.
Yahya al-Hammadi, a 21-year-old engineering student, told Reuters she had attended the faculty until the previous day.
“She was not known to be active in anything, not politics nor religion,” Hammadi said. “I am totally perplexed by this.”
The woman was the first person to be arrested after two air freight packages containing bombs — both sent from Yemen and addressed to synagogues in Chicago — were intercepted in Britain and Dubai last week.
Authorities tightened security in Sanaa after the bombs were discovered, and on Sunday security officials manned checkpoints across the city, searching vehicles and checking papers.

Meanwhile, Emirati investigators said Sunday there is no evidence a UPS cargo plane that crashed in Dubai in September was brought down by an explosion, heading off speculation that the accident might be linked to parcel bombs sent from Yemen.
US President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism adviser has said American investigators involved in the probe are taking a closer look at the crash in the wake of last week’s bomb plot.
Questions about the fate of the three-year-old Boeing 747-400 resurfaced following the discovery of two parcel bombs sent through international shipping companies at airports in Dubai and Britain. Authorities say that plot bears the hallmarks of al-Qaeda’s Yemeni offshoot.
The UAE’s General Civil Aviation Authority said in a statement sent to the state news agency WAM on Sunday that the wreckage and flight recorders of the UPS cargo plane that crashed Sept 3 showed no indication of an onboard blast.
“The GCAA investigation team has thoroughly analyzed the technical data and has concluded that there was no presence of acoustic evidence or any forensic indication supporting the detonation of an explosive device,” the Emirati regulator said.

Air freight
The German government said on Sunday that it, Britain, France and the United States had stopped all air freight from Yemen after the discovery of the two bombs.
“The German government has ordered a stop to freight to Germany from Yemen until further notice,” Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told German broadcaster MDR. “This is a joint action with the United States, Great Britain and France.”
Yemeni forces on Saturday arrested a woman believed to be involved in sending explosive packages from Yemen bound for the United States that sparked a global security alert.
Germany’s federal crime office (BKA) said it had delivered the decisive tip to British authorities about the explosive parcel intercepted in Britain early on Friday, which was trans-shipped via Cologne-Bonn airport.
The other package was intercepted in Dubai.

De Maiziere said the BKA had acted after Saudi intelligence services told Germany about a suspect US-bound package.
“What exactly they contained and what damage could have been done is still being looked into,” he said. “Similar packages were evidently found in Dubai, so we’re assuming this was a coordinated undertaking on a large scale.”
De Maiziere added an investigation would be made into whether there were gaps in the policing of air freight security.
A spokeswoman for the BKA said by the time Germany was informed about the package it was too late to intervene locally.
“It was already on the way to Britain,” she said. “We managed to inform our partners in London so that they were able to look specifically for the package and find it.”
Asked how the suspect parcel had remained undetected on German soil, industry sources told Reuters that packages that had already passed through security were not necessarily subjected to further checks while in transit.