WASHINGTON — American intelligence officials in September intercepted several packages containing books, papers, CDs and other household items shipped to Chicago from Yemen and considered the possibility that the parcels might be a test run for a terrorist attack, two officials told The New York Times.

Now the intelligence officials believe that the shipments, whose hour-by-hour locations could be tracked by the sender on the shippers’ Web sites, may have been used to plan the route and timing for two printer cartridges packed with explosives that were sent from Yemen and intercepted in Britain and Dubai on Friday.

In September, after American counterterrorism agencies received information linking the packages to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terror network’s branch in Yemen, intelligence officers stopped the shipments in transit and searched them, said the officials, who would discuss the operation only on the condition of anonymity. They found no explosives, and the packages were permitted to continue to what appeared to be “random addresses” with no connection to the terrorist group in Chicago.

“At the time, people obviously took notice and — knowing of the terrorist group’s interest in aviation — considered the possibility that AQAP might be exploring the logistics of the cargo system,” one of the officials said, referring to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

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