They've sent you exploding printer cartridges. Your Christmas present last year was a twenty-something with a bomb in his skivvies. So what's al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's latest gift of murderous gadgetry? In a department store, they'd call it Eau du Terror.
Saudi Arabia's Okaz newspaper reports that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) recently tried to kill government officials and religious clerics by sending agarwood-scented and poison-dosed perfume to their homes and offices. The Saudi Interior Ministry claims it got wind of the plot after the arrest of 149 al-Qaeda suspects in the country comprising 19 separate cells. The suspects allegedly planned to rob banks in order to pay for the perfume plot and others.
The perfume poison is just the latest in a series of creatively-engineered AQAP weapons. In late summer of last year, a Saudi al-Qaeda member tried to assassinate the country's Deputy Interior Minister with a bomb allegedly placed up his butt. Last Christmas, AQAP equipped Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab with an underwear bomb in an attempt to blow up a flight to Detroit. And most recently, the Saudi al-Qaeda affiliate tried to bring down a UPS plane using explosives hidden in printer cartridges. The explosive devices are the craftsmanship of one man, AQAP bomb-maker Ibrahim al-Asiri, though there's no word yet on whether he was involved in the alleged perfume plot.
But what seems like creativity to some looks like the group's desperation to others. "They might have resorted to perfumes because other traditional plans are constantly uncovered and aborted," says Turki Abdullah al-Sudairi, editor of Saudi Arabia's Al-Riyadh newspaper. In that sense, it's worth remembering that the printer cartridge plot was reportedly foiled by a tip from Saudi intelligence and the Christmas day underwear bomb, for all its theatrics, failed to actually kill anyone.
AQAP may also bristle at the suggestion that they planned to target religious scholars with the poisoned perfume. After the Saudi Interior Minister suggested that the group might launch attacks against the annual hajj pilgrimage last month, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula vehemently denied the suggestion showing, as Yemen scholar Greg Johnsen points out, an acute sensitivity to perceptions of their target selections' Islamic legitimacy.
Photo: Wikipedia
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