One of two mail bombs sent from Yemen last week was disarmed just 17 minutes before it was set to go off, the French interior minister Brice Hortefeux said Thursday on France’s state-run France-2 television.

France has been on heightened alert since mid-September. Hortefeux said last month Saudi intelligence had advised of a heightened threat to France from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen-based al-Qaeda affiliate. Last week, Osama bin Laden named France in an audio message that Hortefeux said on Thursday has been “99.9 percent authenticated.”

But the Yemeni-based mail bombs are so far unconnected to the heightened terror alert in France.

Investigators found that those bombs, pulled off cargo planes in England and the United Arab Emirates Friday, were wired to cell phones and hidden in the toner cartridges of computer printers. The communication cards had been removed, U.S. officials said, making it likely the terrorists intended the alarm or timer functions to detonate the bombs.

They also said each bomb was attached to a syringe containing lead azide, a chemical initiator that would have detonated PETN explosives packed into each printer cartridge.

Investigators have centered on the Yemeni al-Qaeda faction’s top bomb maker, Ibrahim al-Asiri. He had previously designed a bomb that failed to go off on a crowded U.S.-bound passenger jetliner last Christmas.

This time authorities believe al-Asiri packed four times as much explosive into these bombs. They contained 300 and 400 grams of the industrial explosive PETN, according to a German security official. By comparison, the bomb on the Detroit-bound plane last Christmas contained about 80 grams.

One of the explosive devices found in Dubai had flown on two airlines before it was seized. The first flight had a 144-seat capacity and the second had a capacity ranging from 144 to 335.

The addresses to two Chicago-area synagogues on the packages were out of date and the names on the packages included references to the Crusades, leading officials to believe the synagogues were not the actual targets.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.