Asia-Pacific

Security reviews under way after flight attack

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-12-28 20:38

Security reviews under way after flight attack

Northwest Airlines Flight 253 sits on the tarmac at Detroit Metro Airport December 27, 2009 in this video grab provided by WDIV-TV in Detroit. [Agencies]

WASHINGTON: Despite the ease with which an alleged terrorist got an explosive aboard a Detroit-bound flight, the Obama administration says the incident shows the US aviation security system worked.

Billions of dollars have been spent on aviation security since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when commercial airliners were hijacked and used as weapons.

Much of that money has gone toward training and equipment that some security experts say could have detected the explosive device the 23-year-old Nigerian man is believed to have hidden on his body on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

"One thing I'd like to point out is that the system worked," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Sunday morning on CNN.

"This was one individual, literally, of thousands that fly and thousands of flights every year," Napolitano said. "And he was stopped before any damage could be done."

Investigators are piecing together Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's brazen attempt to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on December 25. Law enforcement officials say he tucked below his waist a small bag holding his potentially deadly concoction of liquid and powder explosive material.

Harold Demuren, the head of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, said Monday that Abdulmutallab's ticket came from a KLM office in Accra, Ghana. Demuren said Abdulmutallab bought the $2,831 round-trip ticket from Lagos, Nigeria, to Detroit via Amsterdam on December 16.

Demuren declined to comment about Abdulmutallab's travels in the days before he boarded his December 24 flight from Lagos to Detroit via Amsterdam, saying FBI agents and Nigerian officials view the information as "sensitive." He said Abdulmutallab checked into his flight with only a small carryon bag.

Abdulmutallab had been placed in a US database of people suspected of terrorist ties in November, but there was not enough information about his activity to place him on a watch list that could have kept him from flying.

Officials said he came to the attention of US intelligence last month when his father, a prominent Nigerian banker, reported to the American Embassy in Nigeria about his son's increasingly extremist religious views.

In a statement released Monday morning, Abdulmutallab's family in Nigeria said that after his "disappearance and stoppage of communications while schooling abroad," his father reached out to Nigerian security agencies two months ago. The statement says the father then approached foreign security agencies for "their assistance to find and return him home."

The family says: "It was while we were waiting for the outcome of their investigation that we arose to the shocking news of that day."

The statement did not offer any specifics on where Abdulmutallab had been.

Abdulmutallab's success in smuggling and partially igniting the material on Friday's flight prompted the Obama administration to promise a sweeping review of aviation security, even as the Homeland Security secretary defended the current system.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the government will investigate its systems for placing suspicious travelers on watch lists and for detecting explosives before passengers board flights.

Both lines of defense were breached in an improbable series of events Christmas Day that spanned three continents and culminated in a struggle and fire aboard a Northwest jet shortly before its safe landing in Detroit.

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