Nigeria offers US images of bomber at Lagos airport: minister

ABUJA, Jan 7, 2010 (AFP) - Nigeria offered Thursday to provide US investigators images of the suspected US plane bomber going through security checks at Lagos airport on December 24.

Justice Minister Michael Aondoaaka told reporters that the images would prove that security staff had done their job.


"We have visual information...(that shows) our security agents did what they were supposed to do," the minister told journalists.

Nigeria's government has demanded it be removed from a US terror watchlist of 14 countries, including Iran, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, introduced this week after a security review ordered by President Barack Obama.

Aondoaaka said Nigeria would not allow "such a single incident to rupture the relationship and I am very hopeful that with facts and what we are placing before the US government, they will rescind their decision."

"Nigeria is not a terrorist country. Nigeria will not, cannot be on the list of countries of interest because we have a track record as a peacekeeper," added the minister.

"We have nothing to hide," Aondoaaka said. "The young man came in, he was screened and it is there on the visual information," he said, pledging Abuja's full cooperation with US investigators.

"He removed his shoes. He first came, he walked to the right, tried to go to the right screening machine, then suddenly changed his mind and turned to the left, removed his shoes and entered. It is there," the minister said.

Aondoaaka said that security staff "did all that was required under the law to ensure that Nigeria complies with international standards."

"I have assured my colleague, the attorney general of the US, that we will give full cooperation and all requests made related to the investigations will be granted," he said.

"We have taken steps to deal with this situation, to pre-empt any future occurrence of this situation in Nigeria and elsewhere in the world."

The suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was in transit at Lagos, having arrived from Accra in Ghana before boarding a flight to Amsterdam and on to Detroit.

He was arrested after trying to set off a bomb hidden in his underwear on a US Northwest Airlines flight as it approached Detroit the following day.

An official at Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos told AFP that staff at the airport had done their job and the fault for the incident lay with the intelligence services in Washington.

A first report on intelligence failures exposed by the Christmas Day attack was due out Thursday.

Obama's national security advisor James Jones said the public would feel a "certain shock" when they read about systemic failures in operations designed to keep them safe.

Abdulmutallab was indicted on six counts Wednesday by a US grand jury for attempted murder and trying to use a weapon of mass destruction aboard a US plane and could face life imprisonment.



(c) 2010 AFP