Nigerian charged in airline bombing attempt

WASHINGTON — Federal authorities Saturday charged a Nigerian with trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, and officials said the suspect told them he obtained explosive chemicals and a syringe that were sewn into his underwear from a bomb expert in Yemen associated with al-Qaida.

In an affidavit filed in support of the criminal charges, the authorities said the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, had attempted to ignite the device, which was attached to his body, resulting "in a fire and what appears to have been an explosion."

The affidavit said the device contained pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), a highly explosive substance used in 2001 by Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber whose attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight also was thwarted.

Federal authorities have not independently corroborated the Yemen connection claimed by Abdulmutallab, who was burned in his failed attempt to bring down the airliner. But a law-enforcement official briefed on the investigation said Saturday that the suspect's account was "plausible. I see no reason to discount it."

Abdulmutallab's name was inserted last month into the U.S. intelligence community's central repository of information on known suspected international terrorists after his father, a prominent Nigerian banker, told officials at the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria he was concerned about his son's increasingly extremist religious views.

About 550,000 individuals are registered in the database, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE. A subset of that is the Terrorist Screening Data Base, or TSDB, which has about 400,000 individuals.

By contrast, fewer than 4,000 names from the TSDB are on the "no-fly" list, and an additional 14,000 on a "selectee" list that calls for mandatory secondary screening, an Obama administration official said.

At the time Abdulmutallab's name was recorded in the TIDE database in November, the official said, "there was insufficient derogatory information available" to warrant putting him in the TSDB, no-fly or selectee lists, and so he was not on any watch list when he boarded the plane bound for Detroit.

Abdulmutallab was issued a regular visitor's visa by the U.S. Embassy in London in June 2008, according to the administration official, and was granted a two-year visa, which is still valid, the official said. He had traveled to the United States once before, to Houston, in August 2008.

The Justice Department charged that Abdulmutallab willfully attempted to destroy or wreck an aircraft and that he placed a destructive device in the plane.

U.S. District Judge Paul Borman read Abdulmutallab the charges Saturday in a conference room at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., where the suspect is being treated for burns.

Borman said Abdulmutallab faced up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine from the two charges. When asked if he understood the charges, Abdulmutallab said, "Yes, I do."

President Obama, on vacation in Hawaii, ordered a full review of the law-enforcement and intelligence databases related to the "no-fly list" to make sure the procedures and practices still make sense, a senior administration official said Saturday.

Abdulmutallab told FBI agents he was connected to the al-Qaida affiliate, which operates largely in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, by a Yemeni cleric whom he contacted via the Web. The cleric was not identified.

If corroborated, Abdulmutallab's travel to Yemen for terrorist instruction and explosives underscores the emergence of that country as a major hub for al-Qaida, perhaps beginning to rival the terror network's base in Pakistan.

Abdulmutallab grew up in a rarefied slice of Nigeria, the son of an affluent banker. He attended one of the West Africa's best schools, the British School of Lomé in Togo. After high school, he enrolled at University College London to study mechanical engineering.

In London, police investigators were seen Saturday taking equipment and bags from apartments in a posh neighborhood, where Abdulmutallab apparently lived while attending college.

While in high school, Abdulmutallab began preaching to fellow students about Islam, according to a report in ThisDay, a Nigerian newspaper.

His father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, until recently had served as chairman of the First Bank of Nigeria, and his mother's family is originally from Yemen, according to accounts in Nigerian newspapers.

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.