President Barack Obama "is legitimately and correctly alarmed that things that were available, bits of information that were available, patterns of behaviour that were available, were not acted on", he said. In an interview for USA Today newspaper, National Security Adviser Gen James Jones said people would feel "a certain shock" that clues about Mr Abdulmutallab's role were not acted on. However, Mr Hanouk is a member of a prominent tribal family, our correspondent says, and this suggests that the government is prepared to push hard in directions it might be easier to leave alone.Ĭonfirmation of the meeting between the alleged bomber and the cleric comes as the White House plans to publish a declassified account of the Christmas Day plot. There have been a number of shootouts recently, but the authorities have as yet been unable to capture one of their prime targets, Mohammed al-Hanouk. The BBC's Jeremy Bowen in Sanaa says Yemen has been accused of soft-pedalling on al-Qaeda and is currently under pressure from its ally the US to produce results. However, friends and relatives say he was not harmed in the raid. Some reports say the cleric was killed just before the Christmas attack, in an airstrike on a suspected al-Qaeda base. He is in fact trying to instigate terrorism." He's clearly a part of al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula," Mr Brennan, who is US deputy national security adviser, told CNN last week. Mr Awlaki, a radical American Muslim cleric of Yemeni descent, has been linked to other attacks, including that carried out by Maj Nidal Malik Hasan of the US Army at the Fort Hood base in Texas in November. Mr Alimi said the suspect met Mr Awlaki in the cleric's ancestral home province of Shabwa. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has been in custody since 25 Decemberīut UCL has said there is no evidence to suggest Mr Abdulmutallab was radicalised while he was there, and UK officials responding to the Yemeni statement said they still believed his recruitment occurred in Yemen in the months before the attack.
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