U.S. probes cleric's role in plane bombing attempt

WASHINGTON - U.S. counterterrorism agencies are investigating whether American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who has become a key figure in the al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen, played a role in the attempted Christmas Day airplane bombing near Detroit, intelligence and law enforcement officials said.

Intercepts and other information point to connections between terrorism suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and al-Awlaki, who also communicated with the accused U.S. Army gunman in the Nov. 5 attack on Fort Hood, Texas, that left 13 people dead.

Some of the information about al-Awlaki comes from Abdulmutallab, 23, the Nigerian charged with attempting to detonate a hidden packet of PETN explosive aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit, the officials said.

Abdulmutallab, under questioning by the FBI, has said that he met with al-Awlaki and senior al-Qaida members during an extended 2009 trip to Yemen, and that the cleric was involved in some elements of planning or preparing the airliner attack and in providing religious justification for it, they said.

Other intelligence linking al-Awlaki and Abdulmutallab only became apparent after the attempted bombing, including communications intercepted by the National Security Agency that indicated that the cleric was meeting with "a Nigerian" in preparation for some kind of operation, according to a U.S. intelligence official.

Intelligence officers did not realize the importance of that piece of information at the time because the name of the Nigerian was not included, the information was vague and it was lost in a flood of threat information coming into the NSA.

Al-Awlaki, 38, who was born in New Mexico, has been a subject of intense interest and concern to the U.S. government since he emerged as a spiritual leader of several of the Sept. 11 hijackers while preaching at mosques in San Diego and the Washington, D.C., suburbs before the 2001 attacks.

Al-Awlaki spent much of his life in the United States before moving to London to escape intense FBI scrutiny. He has been living in Yemen for at least five years, spending at least a year of it in custody.

Since his release, he has used Yemen as a safe haven from which to build his Internet site into a popular global forum to spread jihadist rhetoric and encourage attacks on Western interests.