Two packages containing explosive devices originating in Yemen and bound for two places of Jewish worship in Chicago set off a global terror alert on Friday. One package was found at a FedEx facility in Dubai, and another was found early Friday morning at an airport in Britain, sparking a day of dramatic precautionary activity in the United States. Speaking at the White House Friday afternoon, President Obama called the packages a “credible terrorist threat against our country,” and confirmed that they “did apparently contain” explosives. Earlier reports had said that the device found in Britain did not.
The wide-scale alert spread to the United States on Friday morning, when officials isolated two cargo planes at airports in Newark and Philadelphia and searched them for packages originating in Yemen, and New York police searched a delivery truck in Brooklyn. None of the shipments reaching the United States from Yemen were found to contain explosives.
Two Air Force F-15 warplanes escorted a civilian passenger plane from the United Arab Emirates into Kennedy Airport in New York. Cable news networks trained cameras on the skies over New York as the passenger jet, Emirates Flight 201, arrived and landed safely. An American military spokesman said that two Canadian CF-18 combat aircraft were diverted from a training mission to trail the flight across Canadian air space, and when it passed into American air space, two Air Force F-15 warplanes took over escort duties.
For more: Obama Says Explosives Were U.S. Bound - NYTimes.com
No comments:
Post a Comment