Step up focus on Yemen

HONOLULU (HAWAII) – UNITED States President Barack Obama, for the first time, accused an Al-Qaeda affiliate on Saturday of arming and training a Nigerian man for a thwarted suicide mission to blow up a US airliner.

In his weekly radio and video address, Mr Obama promised to hold the group, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, to account for the attempted attack and declared that the US was at war with a ‘far-reaching network of violence and hatred’.

The President’s vacation in his home state of Hawaii has been interrupted by the ramifications of the failed attack on a Northwest Airlines jet heading for Detroit on Christmas Day.

He has reviewed preliminary results of probes he ordered into the attack and said details were becoming clear about the 23-year-old suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

‘We know that he travelled to Yemen, a country grappling with crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies,’ Mr Obama said in his address, posted on the White House website on Saturday.

‘It appears that he joined an affiliate of Al-Qaeda, and that this group, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, trained him, equipped him with those explosives and directed him to attack that plane headed for America.’ — AFP, REUTERS

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