Too Close for Comfort

The bombs disguised as printer cartridges that were recently discovered with help from Saudi intelligence were too close to home for those of us in the UAE. The packages were delivered by UPS and Federal Express from Yemen and were headed on to the USA before they were tracked down in England and Dubai. They were so cleverly disguised that the packages passed through the regular screening process undetected and were only found and removed because the tracking numbers were provided. One of them traveled on a Qatar Airways passenger jet from Doha to Dubai, a flight I have taken before.

Yemen, where the packages originated, borders the UAE to the south, and apparently UPS and Federal Express do not have full offices but use third parties to provide service there. Given that Yemen is known to be a hub of Al Qaeda activity, it is upsetting, to say the least, to discover the holes in security. One would think that any package traveling from Yemen would be subject to the extra scrutiny, and that delivery services such as FedEx and UPS would be on high alert. In fact, a UPS plane exploded in Dubai in September, killing two pilots without known cause, and only now is that accident thought to be connected to the Yemen printer bombs. Maybe now the intelligence community can put the pieces together and take appropriate preventative action before another major catastrophe happens. Banning or physically examining the contents of all packages from Yemen would be a good start. Packages I send from the USA to Dubai are routinely opened for customs inspection, so why not these packages of suspicious origin?