Britain has imposed restrictions on UPS air cargo passing through the country until the company conforms with security regulations, the Department of Transport said on Friday.
"We can confirm that, following careful consideration, the Department has restricted the number of sites in the UK at which UPS Ltd are permitted to screen air cargo until it has satisfied current security requirements," it said in a statement.
"The safety of the travelling public is paramount and our security regime is kept under constant review."
The statement added that for "obvious security reasons" it would not give details on the reason it had taken the decision but a Department of Transport spokesman told AFP it was "not in relation to any specific threat."
UPS is responsible for screening its cargo passing through Britain.
The move follows the discovery last year of an Al-Qaeda plot to send parcel bombs from Yemen to the United States on cargo flights, which included an attempt to send a package containing explosives on a UPS flight through Britain.
Britain introduced new security measures last November following the plot, in which explosives in a printer ink cartridge were discovered on a plane at East Midlands Airport, central England, in the early hours of October 29.
British security officers removed the device before the plane continued its journey to Chicago. British police said the bomb had been timed to explode over the eastern United States.
The bomb was one of two packages sent from Yemen and addressed to synagogues in Chicago containing the explosive PETN, sparking a global scare.
The other package, also consisting of explosive contained in an ink cartridge, was discovered at Dubai airport and was being transported by US delivery company FedEx. The plot was foiled after a tip-off from Saudi Arabia.
German officials said the two bombs contained between 300 and 400 grammes of PETN each. The explosive is difficult to detect and easy to pack into seemingly innocuous devices.
The Yemen branch of Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the plot, according to the monitoring website SITE.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is also thought to be behind a number of recent attacks, including last year\'s Christmas Day "underpants bomb" scare, in which a Nigerian student smuggled a PETN-based device onto a US-bound passenger flight.
That device failed to fully explode, and the plane landed safely.
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