The timer on the bomb found on a cargo plane at East Midlands Airport in England last month was set to ensure the device would detonate over the eastern seaboard of the US, Scotland Yard said on Wednesday.
Forensic and other tests revealed that if the cargo plane’s journey had gone to schedule, the device — in a package addressed to a synagogue in Chicago — would have gone off in midair.
Police revealed a dramatic sequence of events today.
The device was removed from a UPS aircraft by police officers shortly after 3:30am local time on Oct. 29, the plane having landed an hour before.
At 4:20am, with the suspect package having been removed following intelligence that a bomb was aboard, the plane was allowed to take off.
Repeated examinations by military and police bomb squad officers failed to discover that the device was highly dangerous. At 7:40am, a bomb squad officer removed part of the device, a printer cartridge, inadvertently making it safe.
It was only when a second printer bomb was discovered in Dubai that bomb officers examined the device in the UK again and discovered it was dangerous.
A Scotland Yard spokesman said the cargo plane arrived at East Midlands Airport from Cologne at 2:13am, leaving at 4:20am “after the suspect package had been removed.”
“Forensic examination has indicated that, if the device had activated, it would have been at 10:30am,” the spokesman said. “If the device had not been removed from the aircraft, the activation could have occurred over the eastern seaboard of the US.”
He added that the bomb had been “disrupted” when explosives officers removed the printer cartridge during their initial examination of the device.
Experts in Germany said the bomb and another found in Dubai contained at least 300g of the powerful explosive PETN.
It had traveled through a UPS hub at Germany’s Cologne airport before being detected in the UK following the tip-off, officials said.
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