M A I N   N E W S

More bombers on the way, says accused

Washington, December 29
More bombers are on their way to target America, the Nigerian Al-Qaida suspect charged for trying to blow up a US airliner has told the FBI, setting alarm bells among intelligence and security apparatus here.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab told the FBI that "there were more just like him in Yemen and would strike soon," the ABC News reported, quoting officials familiar with the investigation.

A tape released by Al-Qaida leaders in Yemen some four days before the failed attempt to blow up the US plane had said that "we are carrying a bomb to hit the enemies of God".

Abdulmutallab, 23, has been charged with attempting to blow up the US plane and planting an explosive device on it. He was arrested soon after his failed bid to ignite explosives inside the Amsterdam-Detroit Northwest Airlines flight 253 on Christmas Day with nearly 300 people on board. The explosive was identified as PETN — pentaerythritol tetranitrate — which was concealed in his underwear.

According to news reports, Abdulmutallab has told FBI that he was trained for more than a month in Yemen, given 80 grams of a high explosive cleverly sewn into his underpants, that went undetected by standard security screening.

"They know that this is a weakness and an Achilles' heel in our airport security system," said ABC News consultant and former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.

Federal authorities met today to reassess the system of terror watchlists to determine how to avoid the lapse that allowed a man with explosives to board a flight even though he was flagged as a possible terrorist.

Meanwhile, the online digital trail of the Nigerian indicated his jehadi fantasies, a media report said today.

"... Basically they are jehad fantasies," Abdulmutallab wrote on a online chat session on February 20, 2005, according to transcripts of the chat obtained by the ABC News.

Eighteen years old at the time, Abdulmutallab paints an online portrait of alienation, the news channel said.

"I have no friend. Far from home, at a school with few Muslims, no one to consult, no one to support me and I feel depressed... I imagine how the great jehad will take place," Abdulmutallab said.

"How the Muslims will win, and rule the whole world,” he wrote, adding that “do I have to clarify anything further?" In 2005 he was chatting under the screen name Farouk1986.

On, January 26th, 2007, Abdulmutallab listed seminars for what was called the "War on Terror Week". In an online video, Asim Qureshi, one of the speakers in the seminar, said: "We know it is incumbent upon all of us to support jehad against the oppression of the West".

According to The Washington Post, in a posting in January 2005, Farouk1986 spoke about his loneliness and his "dilemma between liberalism and extremism" as a Muslim.

As a student at the British boarding school in Togo, Farouk1986 wrote that he was lonely, the daily said. "I'm active, I socialise with everybody around me, no conflicts, I laugh and joke but not excessively," he wrote in one posting seeking counselling from online peers. — PTI

Headley FBI’s second biggest bust of ’09

Washington, December 29
The arrest of Pakistani-American LeT operative David Coleman Headley, that busted an LeT plot to carry out terror strikes in India, has been classified by the FBI as its second biggest case for the year 2009.

The Headley case figured at number two in the 10 biggest cases of the year in a list in which the case of two young American extremists was placed on the top. "The threat posed by extremists is real and it continues to morph and evolve in new and dangerous ways. We had our hands full during the year, from heading off potential plots on the US soil to identifying Americans being recruited to wage jehad overseas," the FBI said in its statement.

Headley was arrested by the FBI in October along with his school-mate and friend Tahawwur Hussein Rana on charges of planning terrorist attacks in India and Denmark. He has now also been charged with being involved in the Mumbai terror attacks in November 2008, which killed more than 170 persons including six US nationals. At the top was the case of the 'Jehadists of Georgia' in which the FBI busted a potential terror plot by two young Americans Ehsanul Islam Sadequee and Syed Haris Ahmed. "Their story is indicative of both the evolving homegrown extremist threat and the FBI's post 9/11 intelligence-driven investigations," it said.

"With little more than an Internet connection and the radicalising influences of overseas terrorists, two middle-class young men in Atlanta went from Rhetoric to plotting jehad," the FBI said. Among other prominent cases listed for this year are young men from Minnesota travelling to Somalia to join extremist groups, Najibullah Zazi's attempted bombing of federal building, arrest of seven men including father and two son on charges of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and to wage jehad overseas.

Other foiled plots include arrest of four people outside a New York synagogue and charged with planning to blow up Jewish targets; convicting of five men of providing material support to the Al-Qaida and planning attacks on US targets, including the Sears Tower in Chicago, and Ali al-Marri the Al-Qaida "sleeper" operative working in the US pled guilty to charges relating to his role in the 9/11 attacks. — PTI