A woman suspected of sending two mail bombs found on cargo planes in the United Arab Emirates and England has been arrested in Yemen, as investigators in a growing international probe hunt for additional suspects in what's been called an al Qaeda terror plot.
Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh confirmed that fresh evidence, provided by the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates, had led to the arrest.
"According to our information, a woman has sent the packages through the agents (companies)," Saleh said in his briefing.
The detained woman is a 20-year-old medical student, and her mother has also been arrested in the case, the Associated Press reported.
Investigators are still looking for another two dozen suspect packages in the terrorist plot, which used explosives strong enough to bring down a cargo jet.
U.S. authorities announced Friday that investigators in England and Dubai discovered packages sent from a Yemen address bound for Chicago synagogues. The packages, discovered after officials received tips from security forces in Saudi Arabia, contained the explosive PETN.
A Yemeni security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Saturday that the ongoing investigation includes 26 packages, some of which have already left Yemen.
Investigators are interviewing cargo workers at Yemen's airport, as well as employees of Yemeni shipping companies that have contracts with FedEx and UPS, the official said.
Senior U.S. officials confirmed Saturday that it appears al Qaeda's branch in Yemen, which was behind last year's failed bombing of a U.S. passenger plane on Christmas, is also behind the latest threat.
A statement from police in Dubai quoted by the official state news agency WAM said the bomb found in a FedEx shipment contained PETN, the white powder explosive, in the ink cartridge of a computer printer. The bomb was rigged to detonate via a cellphone signal.
The bomb was prepared in a "professional manner," the statement said.
The second package was found at an airport in England and preliminary tests showed that it, too, contained PETN. The chemical was also used in the foiled Christmas attack.
U.S. officials believe that Yemeni-based bomb mastermind Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri was behind the devices. Al-Asiri was also implicated on the Christmas plot.
Friday's drama also included fears that a bomb was aboard an Emirates Airlines passenger jet that was escorted by both Canadian and U.S. fighter planes to New York. No explosives were found on the jet.
The plot has heightened concerns about al Qaeda's operations in Yemen, which U.S. counterterrorism chief John Brennan called the terror network's most active franchise.
Yemen is host to a number of al Qaeda militants, including U.S.-born Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been linked to the failed Christmas bombing. Samir Khan, an American who develops al Qaeda propaganda, is also in hiding in Yemen.
Security analyst Chuck Pena said the move toward sending packages as bombs that can be detonated remotely underscores how "creative" terrorists are getting.
"One of the unintended consequences of the war in Iraq and currently the war in Afghanistan is that this type of weaponry is the type of weaponry that the insurgents there created," Pena told CTV News Channel on Saturday in a telephone interview from Washington.
"And then that knowledge gets transferred outside of the theatre of operations to a country like Yemen and gets used by people who may have no real connection back to whether it's al Qaeda in Iraq or what's left of al Qaeda hiding out in Pakistan."
