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From Reuters and AP
A Northwest Airlines passenger from Nigeria, who said he was
acting on al-Qaeda's instructions, tried to blow up the
plane today as it was landing in Detroit, law enforcement
and national security officials said. A senior U.S.
counterterror official says a passenger aboard a Delta Air
Lines flight in Detroit was planning to blow up the plane
but the explosive device failed, the Associated Press
reported today. Passengers subdued the man and may have
prevented him from detonating the explosives, the officials
said.
A White House official said the incident was an
attempted act of terrorism....Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y.,
ranking GOP member of the House Homeland Security Committee,
identified the suspect as Abdul Mudallad, a Nigerian. King
said the flight began in Nigeria and went through Amsterdam
en route to Detroit.
There were 278 passengers aboard the
Airbus 330." A Reuters report quotes Rep. King as
saying, "My understanding is ... that he does have al
Qaeda connections, certainly extremist terrorist
connections, and his name popped up pretty quickly" in a
search of intelligence data bases.
The GCP event was set for 11:00 to 19:00 Detroit time.
Flight 253 was scheduled to land at 11:40, and the bombing
attempt was reported as prior to landing approach to
Detroit.
Though I have not found the actual time, it probably was
after 11. The news began spreading very quickly, and was
more clearly a close call after a few hours. The 8-hour
event was intended to capture the developing emotional
response.
Results show Chisquare 28869 on 28800 df, for p = 0.386 and
Z = 0.289.
It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny
statistical
effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from
noise. This means that every "success" might be largely
driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real
signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect
can
be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of
similar analyses.
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