Female student from Sanaa held in bomb plot
Yemeni forces Saturday arrested a woman, Hanan Al Samawi, suspected of sending mail bombs on two US-bound flights in an alleged Al Qaeda plot that Britain said was aimed at blowing up at least one of the planes.
The arrest came a day after two packages containing explosives and addressed to Jewish places of worship in Chicago were intercepted on cargo aircraft in Dubai and Britain, triggering a massive international security alert.
"Yemeni security forces arrested a woman suspected of sending two parcel bombs," after the house on the outskirts of the capital Sanaa where she was staying was surrounded, Yemen's defence ministry said.
The woman was arrested along with her mother after her mobile phone number was found on the receipt for the parcel bombs, a security official told AFP.
She is a medical student at Sanaa university and her father is a petroleum engineer, the official added.
The legal team representing the woman arrested on suspicion of posting parcel bombs to America were by Sky News as saying she is “innocent and was tricked”.
Engineering student Hanan Al Samawi, 22, was detained along with her mother after being traced by a receipt for the packages.
Two parcel bombs were found on planes in Britain and Dubai on Friday and a further 24 packages have been seized in Yemen's capital Sana'a since.
Radhia Khairan, who is part of the team representing Ms Al Samawi, is quoted by Sky as saying she is a woman of "good morals" who has shown "no criminal side up to now".
Officials said the pair were arrested as part of the hunt for a number of suspects believed to have used forged documents and ID cards that played a role in the plot.
It is understood Samawi is being questioned at Yemen's intelligence headquarters but Khairan said she has not been given access to her yet.
US President Barack Obama has made it clear he suspects the involvement of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Yemen-based branch of Osama bin Laden's extremist network, and vowed to wipe out the organisation.
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh said his country's security services "received information that a girl has sent the parcels from the two cargo companies," Saleh said, apparently referring to UPS and FedEx, the two US package delivery firms through which the parcels were sent.
Yemeni officials also announced the seizure of 26 other parcels on Saturday and said they were being examined.
News of the arrest came shortly after Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser and British Prime Minister David Cameron separately called Saleh to urge his "close" counterterrorism cooperation in the wake of the bomb plot.
Cameron said that after examination of the device found at East Midlands airport in central England, British authorities "believe that the device was designed to go off on the airplane."
"There is no early evidence it was designed to take place over British soil but of course we cannot rule that out," he said from Chequers, his country residence near London, where he met German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
British police said the package intercepted there had been flown in from Yemen via Cologne, Germany. Downing Street said Cameron and Merkel would discuss counter-terrorism cooperation during talks on Saturday and Sunday.
Cameron wrote in the News of the World, Britain's biggest selling Sunday newspaper, that the bomb "bears the hallmarks of Al Qaeda".
In Dubai police said the bomb found there contained the high explosive PETN -- the same substance used by the would-be 2009 Christmas Day "underpants" bomber Farouk Abdulmutallab and 2001 attempted shoe-bomber Richard Reid.
The cargo scare presented a new twist, as Western authorities have usually focused on dangers to passenger jets following the September 11, 2001 attacks, when Al-Qaeda hijacked planes and struck targets in New York and Washington.
France and Germany on Saturday both announced that they had suspended all air freight from Yemen in the wake of the bomb plot. Britain has already banned all flights and unaccompanied cargo from Yemen.
Top officials said the threat level to the United States was unchanged after what Obama called a "credible terrorist threat" but the Department of Homeland Security announced it had boosted security measures.
The White House said Obama had telephoned Cameron on Saturday to thank him for his country's "close cooperation" in helping disrupt the plot.
Obama also called King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia after the White House said Riyadh had provided the tip-off that led to the discovery of the bombs.
Yemen, the ancestral homeland of bin Laden, has become a haven for violent extremists over the past decade.
As well as being the headquarters of AQAP, it is the hiding place for US-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been linked to high-profile terror plots in the United States.