Christmas Day bomber 'recruited in London'
Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab
Thursday, 07, Jan 2010 05:11
The University College London graduate charged with trying to blow up a plane in Detroit airport was recruited by al-Qaida while studying in the UK capital, reports suggest.
Nigerian-born Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, 23, was yesterday charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction to destroy an Amsterdam-to-Detroit jetliner with a homemade bomb sewn into his underwear as it prepared to land on Christmas Day.
According to Sky News foreign affairs editor Tim Marshall, who is in Yemen, the country's deputy prime minister said that "he thought [Mutallab] had been recruited by al-Qaida in London", a claim that senior Home Office officials have since denied, saying that Mutallab was recruited and radicalised abroad.
As the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker, Mutallab's alleged path to terrorism is an unusual one that has shocked and appalled those who knew him. As a pupil at the highly regarded British School of Lomé in Togo, west Africa, he was nicknamed 'the Pope' because of his pious views on alcohol and western decadence.
After leaving school, he won a place at UCL to study mechanical engineering. Classmates remember Mutallab as a quiet student who did not socialise much or have a girlfriend. In an internet chat-room he once wrote: "Can you be my friend? I get lonely sometimes because I have never found a true Muslim friend", and said that he was thinking of going to Yemen.
After graduating from UCL, he moved first to Egypt, and then to Dubai where he studied for an MBA before dropping out and telling his family he did not want to have anything to do with any of them again. It was reported that Mutallab contacted his family in October from Yemen and told them he would be out of touch for seven years.
In interviews with the FBI, Mutallab said he made contact with a radical imam in Yemen who then connected him to al-Qaida leaders in the north of the country. The engineering student said he lived for a month with the terrorists, training and learning how to explode the device.
He is currently being held in a federal prison in Milan, Detroit and is facing a life sentence at his trial beginning next Friday.