US bomb accused 'had broken off family contact'

The young Nigerian man who allegedly tried to bring down a trans-Atlantic flight broke off contact from his worried parents only a few months before the attack, they said today in a statement.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab told his family he would abandon the life that took him from an expensive private school in Togo to a degree at an illustrious London university. That message pushed his father, a prominent banker from Nigeria’s Muslim-dominated north, to contact state security officials and later the US Embassy in hopes of someone bringing home his missing son.