Plane passengers detained in phones scare
A US airliner bound for India was diverted to Amsterdam under escort of two Dutch F-16 jet fighters, after air marshals and the crew grew suspicious of several passengers they saw exchanging mobile phones as the plane was taking off.
Dutch police said they arrested 12 passengers after the Northwest Airlines DC-10 plane turned back over German airspace, but declined to disclose their nationalities or the nature of the suspicions against them.
Rob Staenacker, spokesman for the customs police, which was conducting the investigation, said: “I can tell you 12 people have been arrested.”
A US government official said that crew members and air marshals observed the passengers attempting to use mobile phones and passing phones among themselves while the airliner was taking off.
“It was behaviour that average passengers wouldn’t do,” the official said.
An American passenger, who identified herself only as Alpa, told AP Television News she saw about a dozen people taken off the aircraft in handcuffs who appeared to be of South Asian origin.
“There was no kind of conversation that we could hear. All I could see was that the security police took a lot of people off the plane and handcuffed a few of them,” she said.
Another passenger, who was not identified, told Dutch NOS television he sat next to one of the men and saw nothing suspicious. He described him as possibly being a Muslim from Indonesia, but did not say why he thought that.
The alert came just two weeks after British police said they foiled a terrorist plan to blow up several US-bound aircraft simultaneously – a plot that sent jitters through the airline industry.
Staenacker said the suspects were being held overnight at a detention centre at the airport, and that police could hold them for up to 72 hours before filing charges.
Dutch authorities released little information about the cause of the alert.
The defence ministry said only that Flight NW0042 bound for Bombay returned to Schiphol Airport after the crew grew suspicious of the behaviour of several passengers.
After the captain radioed Amsterdam seeking permission to return with a military escort, routine security measures were swiftly put into place and the jet fighters scrambled from a northern military air field.
The plane was carrying 149 passengers when it turned around shortly after crossing the German border. A Northwest DC-10 has a normal seating capacity of 273.
The flight was cancelled until tomorrow and the passengers were put up in hotels, Northwest spokesman Dean Breest said.
The national anti-terrorism office was informed of the incident, but said there was no reason to raise the country’s threat level, spokeswoman Judith Sluiter said.
“It is the same as it was before – light threat,” Sluiter said.
An amateur audio recording of communications between Schiphol air traffic controllers, the commercial plane’s pilot, and pilots of the F-16 escort planes was circulated widely among Dutch media.
Asked by an air traffic controller whether he wanted fire engines to be ready on the runway when the plane returned, the Northwest pilot replied: “No, sir.”
Like airports around the world, Schiphol raised the level of security after the British disclosed the alleged plot, but Schiphol spokeswoman Pamela Kuypers said threat levels had returned to normal by today.
Several alerts have been sounded since the terrorism plot was outlined in London.
On Friday, a British plane made an emergency landing in southern Italy after a bomb scare and the US Air Force scrambled jets to escort a United Airlines flight from London to Washington as it was diverted to Boston.
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