Mal nacidos....
Una bomba estaba programada para estallar en la costa este de US (posiblemente New York) dice la policia Britanica. La bomba fue encontrada en Inglaterra en uno de los aviones de UPS.
La inteligencia Saudita advirtio del atentado.
Bomb Was Set to Explode Over U.S.
Device Disarmed in England Had Been Timed to Detonate Somewhere Over the Eastern Seaboard, British Police Say
By ALISTAIR MACDONALD
A device found in the U.K. on a United Parcel Service Inc. plane last month was primed to go off over the Eastern seaboard of the U.S., British police said.
A forensic examination showed the device was set to explode at 10:30 a.m. British Summer Time, or 5:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, on Oct. 29, when the aircraft carrying it would have been somewhere over the Eastern U.S., police said.
After a tip from Saudi intelligence, British police intercepted the device—which originated in a shipment from Yemen—at East Midlands Airport at 3:28 a.m. Oct. 29 on a cargo plane bound for Chicago via Philadelphia. The plane left East Midlands at 4:20 a.m., after the suspect package had been removed. Explosives experts didn't disable the device, which was hidden in a printer cartridge, until around 7:40 a.m., police said.
The delay in disrupting the device—which would have put it within about three hours of detonating—may trigger further criticism that the U.K.'s response to the incident was slow.
A White House spokesman said the British findings "underscore the serious nature of the attempted AQAP attack and the challenge we all face in trying to prevent or disrupt such attacks."
A similar device was found at around the same time aboard a cargo plane in Dubai that had come from Yemen, via Qatar. The thwarted bombs heightened concern in the U.K. and U.S. over al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen-based group suspected of being behind the plot. AQAP is also thought by U.S. officials to have been behind the alleged attempt of a Nigerian man to bomb a flight to Detroit on Christmas Day last year.
A British police spokeswoman said it is hard to be more precise in stating where the device would have exploded, because factors such as tail winds, air-traffic control and the fact that cargo planes often reschedule routes make it hard to pinpoint a location at a specific time.
For those reasons, the bomb makers probably expected to bring down a cargo jetliner without full control of where the device would detonate, investigators in the U.S. have said.
AQAP appeared to carry out at least one test run in September, sending harmless household items on cargo flights, officials said, possibly to time the journey to Chicago using Internet tracking to monitor the shipments. U.S. officials say al Qaeda made an educated guess based on that test, and perhaps others, and set the timers in the packages accordingly.
While they would likely have known approximately when and where the package would have arrived, they wouldn't have known its route.
The bomb probably wasn't aimed at the U.K., British officials have maintained, because there was no reason the bomb makers would have known with any certainty the cargo shipment would pass through Britain.
The U.K.'s conclusion about the timing of the explosion contradicts a statement made by French Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux last week, when he told French television the device was 17 minutes from exploding when the British intercepted it.
Both the U.K. and Dubai devices appeared to be wired with cellphone motherboards. However, the phone components didn't include SIM cards, suggesting they might have been built to be triggered by the phones' timers and not by outside phone signals, according to people familiar with the matter.
Authorities also have said it remains unclear whether the devices would have worked as designed had they not been intercepted.
British police said Wednesday that a man had been arrested in England's Midlands region for allegedly encouraging an act of terrorism in connection with the posting on a U.S.-based website of a list of U.K. lawmakers who voted for the Iraq war. The arrest followed the conviction last week of a woman for attempting to murder a top politician who had voted for the Iraq war. Roshonara Choudhry, 21 years old, had been influenced by Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born radical cleric connected to AQAP, according to people familiar with the situation.
—Adam Entous contributed to this article.
Write to Alistair MacDonald at
alistair.macdonald@wsj.com