Obama: Suspicious packages are a 'credible terrorist threat

[Jeffersons Ghost]

Obama: Suspicious packages are a 'credible terrorist threat'
By Peter Finn, Greg Miller and Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 30, 2010; 12:20 AM

Two packages mailed from Yemen and addressed to synagogues in Chicago contained explosive material and represented a "credible terrorist threat," President Obama said Friday, as authorities focused their investigation on an increasingly lethal affiliate of al-Qaeda.

U.S. counterterrorism officials suspect that the packages, which were intercepted in Britain and Dubai, were sent by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which had already demonstrated a flair for sophisticated bombmaking in an attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day.

Obama did not specify any new security measures that would be taken or say that the nation's terrorist alert level had been raised. But he described the threat as serious and pointed once again to Yemen as the source of a terrorist plot, saying his top terrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, had been in touch with that country's president.

The two packages were intercepted at separate locations, one on a UPS plane at East Midlands Airport near Nottingham, England, and the other at a FedEx facility in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. Officials provided no details on the kind of explosives found, but they said they were looking at the possibility that the substance used was PETN, the same explosive used in the Christmas Day plot.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/29/AR2010102904395.html?hpid=topnews