"Just a Cute 'Lil Firecracker"?

Re-edited moments ago to say that "a passenger believed it was a firecracker"

The AP appears to be trying to minimize an attack on civilians, saying in a video report that Nigerian-British student Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, was merely playing with mere party poppers, and mentioning nothing about the significance of the date of the attack.

The man who tried to blow up a US airliner as it prepared to land at Detroit on Christmas Day had an explosive powder strapped to his leg which he tried to ignite by injecting chemicals with a syringe, Fox News reports.

The reasoning behing calling it a firecracker came from a passenger statement like this one, carefully omitting what law enforcement described the IED to be:

One US intelligence official said the explosive device was a mix of powder and liquid. It failed when the passenger tried to detonate it.

"It sounded like a firecracker in a pillowcase," said Peter Smith, a traveller from the Netherlands. "First there was a pop, and then [there] was smoke."