Editor,

I was shocked to read about the attempted suicide bombing of the transatlantic jet by the Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

I was particularly shocked because this young man had everything going for him.

He was the son of a wealthy Nigerian businessman; he’d attended a British school in Togo and studied mechanical engineering at the prestigious University College London.

I had assumed, I guess naively, that only those that had few options in life decided to walk that path.

And if they maybe did have some money, as Osama Bin Laden did, then they had a pathological hatred of the United States because it either supported unpopular leaders, or had troops in ‘their land’.

And truth be told, I had thought that proper, read ‘black’, Africans couldn’t be involved in such silly behaviour because we had more things to worry about than merely 70 virgins in heaven. I guess I was wrong.

Now I’m just confused, what makes a ‘normal’ young person, from a good family, with the world on a platter decide that he wants to kill himself, and lots of innocents, on Christmas day? Can someone tell me?

Teta Kamaliza
Nyarugenge