A young Nigerian man who allegedly tried to bring down a trans-Atlantic flight broke off contact with his worried parents only a few months before the attack, apparently trading a world of wealth for the calling of a jihadist.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab abruptly told his family he would abandon the life that took him from a $25,000-a-year private school in Togo to a degree at an illustrious London university. That message pushed his father, a prominent banker from Nigeria's Muslim-dominated north, to contact state security officials and later the U.S. Embassy in hopes of someone bringing home his missing son.

"We provided them with all the information required of us to enable them do this," said a family statement read Monday, without elaborating.

Instead, the family said they awoke to news of the attempted Christmas Day attack on the Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight carrying 279 passengers and 11 crew members.

His family's wealth made Abdulmutallab an educated Nigerian expatriate, and he continued to travel after he allegedly turned to extremism. The 23-year-old told U.S. officials who arrested him that he had sought extremist training in Yemen. Nigerian officials said the man's round-trip plane ticket was bought on Dec. 16 in Accra, Ghana, for $2,831 in cash, presumably by Abdulmutallab himself.

Abdulmutallab graduated from University College London in 2008 before heading to Dubai and later cutting ties with his family. Loved ones back home struggled to understand his actions.

"From very early childhood, Farouk, to the best of parental monitoring, had never shown any attitude, conduct or association that would give concern," the family's statement read.

A university campus in Dubai said Monday that the young man had been attending the school from January through the middle of this year.

Raymi van der Spek, vice president of the University of Wollongong in Dubai, told The Associated Press that Abdulmutallab took classes for "about seven months" before leaving the Australian public university.

From August until early December, Abdulmutallab was in Yemen, where he had received a visa to study Arabic at a school in the capital Sana'a, according to a statement from the Yemeni Foreign Ministry.

Citing immigration authorities, the statement said Abdulmutallab had previously studied at the school, indicating it was not his first trip to Yemen. Authorities there "are currently investigating who he was in contact with in Yemen, and the results of the investigation will be delivered" to U.S. officials, the statement said.