Officials said the woman was detained as part of a widening search for people believed to have used forged documents and ID cards in the plot thwarted Friday. Authorities on three continents scrambled to check planes from Philadelphia to central England, recovering two live explosive devices addressed to two synagogues in Chicago.

The dragnet in Yemen and the results of a preliminary investigation into one of the bombs in Britain reflected the seriousness of a plot that investigators said bore all the hallmarks of al-Qaida. Yemeni officials said the suspects were believed linked to al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula, the group's affiliate in the Persian Gulf.

Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, told reporters that the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates had provided information that helped identify the woman as a suspect.

Two security officials told The Associated Press the woman was arrested in the al-Rawdah district near the airport in San'a, Yemen's capital. "According to our information, a woman has sent the packages through the agents (companies)," Saleh said in his briefing.

One of the Yemeni officials, a member of the country's anti-terrorism unit and close to the Yemeni team probing the case, said the other suspects had been tied to al-Qaida's faction in Yemen.