20 other underwear bombers and the Ghana connection

Independent on Sunday:

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab told US investigators that about 20 other young Muslim men were being coached in Yemen to blow up planes using a technique identical to the one he employed, CBS News has reported, quoting a British intelligence source.

The broadcaster said it had also established that part of the investigative focus had switched to Ghana, where Abdulmutallab stayed before flying to Lagos, Nigeria, to begin his mission that ended in smouldering failure as Northwest Flight 253 descended into Detroit on Christmas Day. The FBI has officers on the ground in Ghana and believe it is likely the terrorist may well have had his final al-Qa'ida briefing, and supplied with equipment and explosives, there.

The Nigerian arrived in Accra, Ghana, on 9 December from Ethiopia, and remained there until 24 December, when he made the flight to Lagos. It is now known that the Ghanaian hotel he listed on his immigration form was not the one where he was actually staying. All this was more than a month after his father, a wealthy Nigerian banker, had met officials at the US embassy in Abuja to share concerns about his son.

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But as John Brennan, the anti-terrorism director in the White House, noted last week, there may be nothing unlikely about Abdulmutallab at all. Rather, he posited, he is exactly the kind of ordinary person, with no known profile of terror-related activity, that al-Qa'ida will henceforth try to recruit. And we have learned other things about him that fit the new model: he was extremely devout, highly educated and had given voice over the years to loneliness. "Can you be my friend?" he wrote while he was a student at University College London. "I get lonely sometimes because I have never found a true Muslim friend." In the same posting he mused about going to Yemen.

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He was lonely because he had excluded all the normal Muslims as not Islamic enough. He probably had the same problem with women as Maj. Hasan had before he opened fire on people at Fort Hood.

Tracing his steps in Ghana may be productive. It makes sense that he had the bomb before he left Ghana. Finding the people he met with may be a challenge, but it would not surprise me if we do.