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.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing
RSS