A French woman forced a transatlantic flight from Paris to North Carolina to be diverted to Maine on Tuesday after claiming she had a “surgically implanted device.”
The US Airways jet with 179 passengers and crew on board landed safely in Bangor, Maine, where the woman was taken into custody by the FBI before the Boeing 767 continued its journey to Charlotte, North Carolina.
Coming on the heels of a thwarted airline bomb plot by al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch, the incident has laid bare US worries over the shifting tactics of extremists as they seek new ways — and new technologies, including non--metallic bombs — to land a deadly blow against a US target.
Last year, US officials warned airlines that terror groups were studying how to surgically hide bombs inside humans to evade airport security — precisely the threat that emerged when the US Airways passenger made herself known to the cabin crew.
US Senator Susan Collins, the ranking Republican on the US Senate Homeland Security Committee, highlighted the concerns shortly after news broke of Flight 787’s diversion to Maine, saying there had been “intelligence identifying surgically implanted bombs as a threat to air travel.”
Collins, briefed on the incident by US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) head John Pistole, said the TSA recently issued security directives to airports, airlines, and foreign governments, “advising them to take added screening precautions and to be on the lookout for indicators of surgically implanted explosives.”
The US Airways flight took off without incident from Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris, bound for Charlotte.
At some point during the flight, a passenger “handed a note to a flight attendant that said she had a surgically implanted device inside her,” US House Homeland Security Committee chairman Peter King said in a statement.
The Cameroon-born woman was traveling alone with no checked baggage and visiting the US for 10 days, King said.
Alarmed crew isolated the passenger, and “doctors on the flight checked her out and did not see any sign of recent scars,” King added.
Concerned pilots radioed North American Aerospace Defense Command and two F-15 fighter jets based in Massachusetts were scrambled to escort the airliner through its tension-filled descent to Bangor, Maine.
An FBI joint terrorism task force, accompanied by a bomb squad, local police and other security agencies then met the aircraft upon arrival, and “FBI agents and members of a joint terrorism task force interviewed the passenger and others on the plane,” FBI spokesman Greg Comcowich said.
“At this time, there is no indication the plane or its passengers were ever in any actual danger,” he added.
A US official said that the suspect was unlikely to be part of a broader international terror plot linked to groups such as al-Qaeda.
It also came after news emerged earlier this month of a foiled plot to blow up a US-bound airliner.
US officials said the plot involved a non-metallic device, intended for use by a suicide bomber on an airliner, that was an updated version of the “underwear bomb” used in a failed attack on a US-bound flight on Christmas Day 2009.
Though officials touted the disrupted plot as a success, they acknowledged that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula remained determined to strike at the US and its master bombmaker Ibrahim al-Asiri, was apparently hard at work seeking to circumvent airport security.
Washington said Asiri was the prime suspect behind an attempt by the lethal al-Qaeda offshoot to send parcel bombs from Yemen to the US in October 2010.
The packages, addressed to synagogues in Chicago and containing the hard-to-detect explosive PETN hidden in printer ink cartridges, were discovered en route in Britain and Dubai.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS