THE TIMER on the bomb found on a cargo plane at East Midlands airport in central England last month, was set to ensure the device would detonate over the eastern seaboard of the US, Scotland Yard said yesterday.
Forensic and other tests revealed that if the cargo aircraft’s journey had gone to schedule, the device – in a package addressed to a synagogue in Chicago – would have gone off in midair.
Police yesterday revealed a dramatic sequence of events.
The device was removed from a UPS aircraft by police officers shortly after 3.30am on October 29th, the plane having landed an hour before.
At 4.20am, with the suspect package having been removed following intelligence that a bomb was on board, the aircraft was allowed to take off.
Repeated examinations by military and police bomb officers failed to discover that the device was highly dangerous. At 7.40am, a bomb officer removed part of the device, a printer cartridge, inadvertently making it safe.
It was only when a second printer bomb was discovered in Dubai that bomb officers examined the device in Britain again and discovered it was dangerous.
A Scotland Yard spokesman said the cargo aircraft arrived at East Midlands airport from Cologne at 2.13am, leaving at 4.20am “after the suspect package had been removed”.
“Forensic examination has indicated that if the device had activated, it would have been at 10.30am BST,” the spokesman said. “If the device had not been removed from the aircraft, the activation could have occurred over the eastern seaboard of the US.”
He added that the bomb had been “disrupted” when explosive officers removed the printer cartridge during their initial examination of the device at about 7.40am.
Experts in Germany said the bomb, and another found in Dubai, contained at least 300g of the powerful explosive PETN.
It had travelled through a UPS hub at Germany's Cologne airport before being detected at East Midlands following the tip-off, officials said. – ( Guardianservice)