The British government announced a series of measures on Monday intended to protect the traveling public from the emerging threat of cargo-hold bombs created by al-Qaeda as questions continued to be asked about the initial British response to the alert.
British Home Secretary Theresa May outlined pre-departure checks that will be imposed on visitors seeking to enter and leave the UK, including electronic “no fly” lists for terrorism suspects, compiled as a result of passenger profiling.
As the government prepared to meet senior aviation figures to discuss the measures, German security officials disclosed that two bombs discovered at East Midlands Airport and in Dubai on Friday morning contained 300g and 400g of the plastic explosive PETN — enough to put both aircraft at risk.
The devices had been built into desktop computer printers and are reported to have been wired to the printed circuit boards of mobile telephones.
In Washington, the US government was considering whether to grant the CIA far greater powers to select targets in Yemen for assassination by missiles fired from unmanned drones, despite mounting hostility in the country to such air strikes. US and UK investigators were traveling to the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, on Monday in an attempt to identify those behind the bombs. Attention has focused on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and, in particular, upon a -Saudi-born militant, Ibrahim al-Asiri, who is suspected of constructing the bombs.
He is also alleged to have been responsible for making the device involved in the failed Christmas Day bomb plot targeting a plane heading for Detroit last year.
The government was grappling with fears of a security loophole over freight that is heightened by the difficulty of detecting the explosive PETN, found in the printer bombs, but experts said it was detectable by scanners already in use in the UK to scan checked-in baggage. Extending the use of these scanners to cargo would, however, be complex and expensive, it was warned.
British Prime Minister David Cameron told MPs that the UK must take every possible step to “cut out the terrorist cancer” that exists in the region, warning that the threat from Yemen had increased and that it was in the interests of the world to “come together to deal with this.”
May said the government would step up checks on airline passengers seeking to enter the country “to identify better the people who pose a terrorist threat and to prevent them flying to the UK.”
She also announced that from midnight the government was banning all unaccompanied air freight from Somalia. Similar steps were taken at the weekend over unaccompanied air freight from Yemen.
The decision was taken because of “possible contact between al--Qaeda in Yemen and terrorist groups in Somalia, as well as concern about airport security in Mogadishu,” May told MPs.
For the next month, the government is also suspending the carriage of printer toner cartridges heavier than 500g in passengers’ hand baggage on flights departing from UK airports, or their shipping as cargo unless they are handled by a company with government-approved security arrangements.
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