Airline suspect is Nigeria banker's son

Airline suspect is Nigeria banker's son | Reuters

Western wire services are picking up reports from the Nigerian press that Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallib is the son of Umaru Mutallib, a prominent Nigerian banker and former cabinet official. The elder Mutallib was so disturbed by his son's radical religious views that he reported him to the US embassy in Abuja at one point.

The New York Daily News says that Abdul Mutallib's fanaticism on religion goes back to his high school days in Lome, Togo, where other students nicknamed him Alfa or the local word for cleric.

He was living in a $2 million condo in central London and had done an engineering course at Univeerrsity College London.

He was tackled after lighting his incendiary device by passenger Jasper Schuringa, a Dutch film director, who burned his hands as a result of grabbing the device away and extinguishing it.

The alleged Yemen and al-Qaeda links of Abdul Mutallib are still being looked into. He is said to have alleged that he derived his incediary device from Yemen. The Arab nationalist government in Yemen launched airstrikes on the al-Qaeda leadership there just this week, allegedly with US cooperation. http://thinkprogress.org/2009/12/26/obama-focus-yemen/"> Think Progress points out that the intensive US involvement with Yemeni government anti-al-Qaeda efforts gives the lie to Rep. Pete Hoekstra's attempt to politicize the Detroit airline attack as a sign of Obama's failure to connect the dots.




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