US Denies Brits Warned About Detroit Bomber

The UK government made "a mistake" when it claimed that British intelligence about the Detroit bombing suspect was passed on to US authorities in 2008, says a White House source. Gordon Brown's office also seemed to be backpedaling from yesterday's claim that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was included on a list of British residents with contacts to radical imams that was shared with US intelligence.

"There is nothing to stand up the suggestion that the UK provided information to the US that it could or should have acted upon," a UK official told the Daily Telegraph. The dispute over intelligence on Abdulmutallab has further strained relations between the US and Britain, which have been chilly since the release of the Lockerbie bomber last summer. After Brown's announcement last weekend of a new British-US initiative to fight terrorism in Yemen, the White House denied that President Obama had even spoken to the PM recently.
(More Gordon Brown stories.)