 Mutallab was a close friend and associate of the mafia's financier Hamza Zayyad, who convinced him to take on accounting as a profession.Mutallab had agreed in July 2009 to allow his son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the youngest of his 16 children and a son of the second of his two wives (who is from Yemen), to return to the Sanaʽa Institute for the Arabic Language in Yemen to study Arabic from August to September 2009.His son apparently left the Institute after a month, while remaining in Yemen.