The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee said on Tuesday that a foiled al-Qaida plot to bomb an airliner bound for the U.S. was connected to a drone strike in Yemen on Sunday that killed a plotter of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., added that he had been told by the Obama administration that the suspect was “no longer of any concern to us.”
“I was told by the White House that they are connected; they’re part of the same operation, and that’s why I said this operation is still ongoing,” King told CNN's Starting Point.
The New York Times reported that the suspect was still alive, but officials would not say whether he was in foreign custody.
On Fox News, King said of Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso, the alleged plotter of the Cole attack, “The killing of him over the weekend is part of the same intelligence-gathering operation that allowed us to keep the bombs from going on the plane, and also allows us to keep possession of the bomb, where it’s being tested and analyzed by our FBI bomb experts.”
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