Father of Underwear bomb suspect reported his weird religious views to US embassy

NY Times:

The Nigerian man accused of trying to ignite an incendiary device aboard a trans-Atlantic jetliner on Friday came to the attention of American officials at least “several weeks ago,” but the initial information was not specific enough to raise alarms that he could potentially carry out a terrorist attack, a senior Obama administration official said on Saturday.

The investigative file was opened after the father of the suspect, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, warned officials at the United States Embassy in Nigeria of his son’s increasingly extremist religious views, the official said.

“The information was passed into the system, but the expression of radical extremist views were very nonspecific,” said the senior administration official, who has been briefed on the inquiry but spoke on condition of anonymity because it is continuing. “We were evaluating him, but the information we had was not a lot to go on.”

The incident prompted a significant change to airline security on Saturday. Domestic and international passengers will not be allowed to move about aircraft during the last hour of a flight, and there will be extra screening of baggage at airports.

It was unclear whether Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name was entered into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list, which includes people with known or suspected contact or ties to a terrorist or terrorist organization. That list is maintained by the United States National Counterterrorism Center. It includes about 550,000 names.

Those people, however, are not necessarily placed on the federal government’s so-called no-fly list, which prohibits persons entering the United States because of known or suspected terrorists links. Mr. Abdulmutallab was not on that list, federal officials say.

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Mr. Abdulmutallab grew up in a rarefied slice of Nigeria, the son of an affluent banker. He attended one of the West Africa’s best schools, the British School of Lomé in Togo. After high school, he went to Britain and enrolled at the University College London to study engineering.

University College London, in a statement, said that a student named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had enrolled in mechanical engineering courses between September 2005 and June 2008. But it cautioned that it could not confirm that this was the same individual apprehended in Detroit. In London, Scotland Yard was conducting searches of apartments around the college.

His father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, until recently had served as chairman of the First Bank of Nigeria, and his mother’s family is originally from Yemen, according to news accounts in Nigerian newspapers.

Investigators are now examining how Mr. Abdulmutallab, at age 23, apparently rebelled against this privileged upbringing to pursue an extremist goal. It was while still in high school that Mr. Abdulmutallab began preaching to fellow students about Islam, according to a report in ThisDay, a Nigerian newspaper.

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It appears this guys fall into the category of a rich man's son rather than a poor desperate Muslim. In that regard he is like bin Laden and Mohammad Atta. I predict the myth of the poor desperate Muslim will survive this attack.