Visitors from terror-prone nations to US will be frisked

NEW DELHI: Underpants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab has changed the security protocol at US airports. Travellers flying in from Pakistan and 13 other terror-prone countries to the US, the Obama administration said, will be “patted down and their carry-on bags searched”.

The stringent Transportation Security Administration (TSA) rules have already been notified. The department’s website said citizens of Pakistan, Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen will have to go through “full-body patdown and physical inspection of property”.

Washington Post quoted TSA officials as saying that all international passengers will be screened and the majority of passengers will be screened using threat-based or random measures. “These are designed to be sustainable measures that are a significant increase in our security posture. The measures apply to all passengers with passports from or itineraries through State Sponsors of Terrorism and countries of interest.”

The announcement came on a day the US and the UK announced the shutdown of their embassies in Osama bin Laden’s ancestral home, Yemen. Abdulmuttalab is suspected to have links with the Arabian Peninsula branch of Al Qaeda in Yemen. President Barack Obama acknowledged the link for the first time on Saturday in his weekly address, where he stressed that the administration had been keyed in on Yemen prior to that attack.

The decision to close down embassy has come in for attack with the Republicans projecting it as an admission by the Obama administration about the Yemen’s emerging position as one of the world’s premier terrorist havens. They also described it as a sign of “weakness”.

However, the US administration defended the decision. “There are indications that Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula is targeting our embassy and our personnel. We’re not going to take any chance with the lives of diplomats,” Mr Obama’s counter-terror adviser John Brennan told Fox News.

Security experts in the US maintain that Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula has been a threat for a number of years, but the administration has not been paying attention.