Airport security is a giant exercise in arse-covering — and it doesn’t work (obviously)

Christina Lamb mentioned Abdullah al-Asiri on these pages a few weeks ago, but she was rather coy on detail. Allow me to be less so. Al-Asiri was the al-Qa’eda operative who — following a sojourn in the bogey-country de jour of Yemen — had defected back to Saudi Arabia, on the condition that he be debriefed personally by the Saudi anti-terrorism chief Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef. Thereafter he was frisked, passed through two rounds of airport-style security, and sat down, presumably quite gingerly, with the Prince himself. Then, after some small talk, he detonated a pound of explosives that he had hidden in his bottom.

A pound of explosives sounds like quite a lot to hide in a bottom. Such, I suppose, is the zeal of the jihadi. Plus, the bomb was triggered by a text message, which means he must have had a mobile up there, too. A wrong number would have been a blast, eh? The Prince wasn’t badly hurt, mainly because al-Qa’eda had severely underestimated the insulating power of the jihadi bottom which is, by all accounts, considerable.