[size=20pt]Al Qaeda's Yemeni wing claims Detroit attack
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Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for the failed Christmas Day bombing of a US-bound aircraft, as the jihadists threatend attacks on the West and Yemen vowed no let-up against them.

Al Qaeda's Arabian peninsula franchise acknowledged in the internet posting that a "technical fault" had caused the failure of the plot against the Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, US monitoring service SITE Intelligence said.

The statement, which was accompanied by a picture of suspected would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, boasted of the coup delivered by the "Nigerian brother" against Western airport security.

He "was able to breach all the modern and sophisticated technologies and checkpoints at the airports around the world," another US monitoring group, IntelCenter, said.

"His act has dealt a huge blow to the myth of American and global intelligence services and showed how fragile its structure is."

The monitoring organisation, which specialises in following Islamic militant groups, said the claim by Al Qaeda's Yemen and Saudi arm marked a "significant escalation in the group's activities."

It was also a "great cause for concern" from the point of view of the potentially widening ambitions of other Al Qaeda regional affiliates, IntelCenter added.

The claim came as US leaders spoke of Yemen as a new frontline in the war against Al Qaeda after it emerged Abdulmutallab had spent time in the impoverished Arab state, apparently for training by Islamic militants who have exploited the loose control of central government over the heavily tribalised provinces.

Washington identified Yemen as a potential Al Qaeda stronghold soon after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States and established a counter-terrorism base just across the Bab al-Mandab strait in Djibouti to run operations in the region.

But Yemen vowed on Monday it would not become a new refuge for Al Qaeda like Afghanistan, even as the jihadists urged new attacks against Western targets in the strategic Gulf region.

"Yemen is a land of peace and security, and will never be a refuge for these terrorist murderers and drug traffickers," the defence ministry newspaper quoted a senior security official as saying.

"Our mountains will never be a new Tora Bora for them," the official added, referring to the Afghan hideout where US-backed Afghan opposition forces came close to capturing or killing Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in December 2001.

"We will hunt them down until we have rooted out their terrorism and cleansed Yemeni soil of their satanic crimes," the newspaper's 26Sep.net site quoted the official as saying.

He promised "more operations against the terrorists and their hideouts" like those of December 17 and 24, when Yemen's air force launched deadly strikes against suspected jihadist targets.

The official's comments came after a statement posted on an Islamist website in the name of Al Qaeda threatened revenge for this month's attacks, in which 68 suspected militants were killed in eight days. Tribal sources and witnesses said many of the dead were civilian bystanders.

The Al Qaeda statement called on Yemen's powerful tribes to "tackle head-on this campaign by the Crusaders and their agents, by striking their military bases, the intelligence stations concealed in their embassies, and their naval vessels operating in the waters off the Arabian peninsula."

Yemen is Bin Laden's ancestral homeland. In the most spectacular attack by the jihadists in the country so far, Al Qaeda suicide bombers killed 17 US sailors on the destroyer USS Cole in the southern port of Aden in October 2000.

The United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen, The New York Times reported late on Sunday.

Citing an unnamed former top CIA official, the newspaper said a year ago the Central Intelligence Agency sent many field operatives with counterterrorism experience to the country.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/29/2781845.htm?section=world