Qaeda plot to blow up US plane foiled

Working with an informant close to al-Qaeda in Yemen,the CIA caught wind of the bomb plot last month,officials said,speaking on condition of anonymity. The would-be bomber was supposed to buy a plane ticket to the United States and detonate the bomb inside the country,officials said.

The device did not contain metal,meaning it probably could have passed through an airport metal detector. But it was not clear whether new body scanners used in many airports would have detected it. The device is an upgrade of the underwear bomb that failed to detonate aboard a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas 2009. Officials said the new bomb was also designed to be used in a passengers underwear,but this time al-Qaeda developed a more refined detonation system.

John Brennan,President Barack Obamas counterterrorism adviser,said Tuesday the discovery shows al-Qaeda remains a threat to US security a year after bin Ladens assassination. And he attributed the breakthrough to very close cooperation with our international partners.

Were continuing to investigate who might have been associated with the construction of it as well as plans to carry out an attack, Brennan said. And so were confident that this device and any individual that might have been designed to use it are no longer a threat to the American people.

On the question of whether the device could have gone undetected through airport security,Brennan said,It was a threat from a standpoint of the design. Though analysis of the device is incomplete,US security officials said they remained confident in the security systems in place.

Rep. Peter King,chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee,said Tuesday that a number of countries provided information and cooperation that helped foil the plot.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein,who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee,said she had been briefed Monday about an undetectable device that was going to be on a US-bound airliner.

Obama had been monitoring the operation since last month,the White House said Monday evening. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said,The device did not appear to pose a threat to the public air service,but the plot itself indicates that these terrorists keep trying to devise more and more perverse and terrible ways to kill innocent people. And its a reminder of how we have to keep vigilant.

Its not clear who built the bomb,but because of its sophistication and its similarity to the Christmas Day bomb,authorities suspected it was the work of master bomb maker Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri. Al-Asiri constructed the first underwear bomb and two others that al-Qaeda built into printer cartridges and shipped to the US on cargo planes in 2010.