Al-Qaeda May Have Invented Explosive Clothing: Report

From same guy behind the underwear bomb
By Ruth Brown,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 5, 2013 6:35 PM CDT
Al-Qaeda May Have Invented Explosive Clothing: Report
Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who constructed the first underwear bomb and two others that al-Qaida built into printer cartridges and shipped to the U.S. on cargo planes in 2010.   (AP Photo/Saudi Arabia Ministry of Interior, File)

From the mastermind behind the underwear bomb, US officials now fear a new couture-based weapon: clothes dipped in liquid explosives. ABC News says senior government officials heard about the potential new threat at a briefing on yesterday's embassy closures. Two officials present at the meeting say the explosive clothes would be undetectable by current security measures. "It's ingenious," says one of them.

The technique is believed to have been developed by Ibrahim al-Asiri, who is also thought to be behind "body bombs." Al-Asiri, a member of al-Qaeda affiliate al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, is one of 25 people named by the Yemeni government today as the country's top terrorists. The government has put a bounty of $23,000 for any information leading to any of their arrests. (More al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula stories.)

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