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Sunday, December 27th, 2009 | Posted by Editor - Blog News Service

A Second Incident Aboard a Flight to Detroit

Northwest Airlines Flight 253 sat on the tarmac after requesting emergency help at Detroit Metropolitan Airport on Sunday.

Northwest Airlines Flight 253 sat on the tarmac after requesting emergency help at Detroit Metropolitan Airport on Sunday.

By MICHELINE MAYNARD and ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: December 27, 2009

DETROIT — The pilots of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit — the same flight involved in Friday’s terrorism attempt — requested emergency assistance Sunday upon landing in Detroit, an airport spokesman said.

The crew had requested police assistance on the ground because a passenger was “verbally disruptive,” according to a statement from Delta Airlines, which acquired Northwest last year.

The Transportation Safety Administration said in a statement that it had been alerted to a “disruptive passenger on board” Flight 253. The T.S.A. said that the flight landed safely at Detroit International Airport at approximately 12:35 p.m. Eastern “without incident.”

“ The aircraft has been moved to a remote location for additional screening,” the agency said. “T.S.A. and law enforcement met the aircraft upon arrival, the passenger is now in custody.”

The White House said that President Obama, who is vacationing in Hawaii, had been told about the latest incident.

Police vehicles met the plane at the far end of the airport, and five buses drove up to the plane, in a repeat of the same scene that occurred on Friday.

“It’s a pretty typical response,” Scott Winter, the airport spokesman, said of the police vehicles. “With an aircraft situation, speed is of the essence.”

Television news showed scenes of lined-up luggage on the tarmac being approached by a bomb-sniffing dog.

Even before the plane arrived, it was already running more than an hour late, according to the arrivals board inside the airport.

The Associated Press reported that the passenger in question was a man from Nigeria, the same country of suspect in Friday’s terrorism attempt. The second Nigerian man was taken into custody after locking himself in the airliner’s lavatory, The A.P. reported. CNN reported that the man had locked himself in the lavatory for such a long time that the crew requested help on the ground.

A Delta spokeswoman says the other 255 passengers have been safely taken off the plane.

Earlier on Sunday, Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security secretary, said that there was so far no evidence of a wider terrorist plot in what federal authorities said was an attempt by a 23-year-old Nigerian man to blow up a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day.

But speaking on CNN’S “State of the Union,” Ms. Napolitano said that the suspect’s claimed ties to Al Qaeda were “part of the criminal justice investigation that is ongoing.”

Although Ms. Napolitano said it would be “inappropriate to speculate” on such ties, a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation over the weekend said that the claims of the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, were plausible, and that he saw no reason to discount Mr. Abdulmutallab’s account that he had obtained explosive chemicals and a syringe sewn into his underwear from a bomb expert in Yemen associated with Al Qaeda.

Asked if Mr. Abdulmutallab was part of a bigger plot or whether he was a “lone wolf,” Ms. Napolitano replied, “Well, right now, we have no indication that it’s part of anything larger, but obviously the investigation continues.”

Ms. Napolitano was pressed on CNN as well as other Sunday news programs why Mr. Abdulmutallab, whose name was in the American intelligence community’s central repository of information on known or suspected international terrorists, had been allowed to board the trans-Atlantic flight in Amsterdam. Mr. Abdulmutallab, the son of a prominent Nigerian banker, was put in the database last month because his father had recently warned officials at the United States Embassy in Nigeria that he was concerned about his son’s increasingly extremist religious views.

“You have to understand that you need information that is specific and credible if you are going to actually bar someone from air travel,” Ms. Napolitano said on CNN. “He was on a general list, which over half a million people — everybody had access to it. But there was not the kind of credible information, in the sense derogatory information, that would move him up the list.”

Ms. Napolitano said that in the next weeks, federal officials will be “really looking at those watch lists procedures in light of this occurring and saying, ‘OK, do those need to be changed?’ They have been in place for a number of years.”

Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name was inserted in November into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or Tide, which has about 500,000 registered individuals. A subset of that is the Terrorist Screening Data Base, or T.S.D.B., which has about 400,000 names. Fewer than 4,000 people from the T.S.D.B. list are on a “no-fly” list, and an additional 14,000 are on a “selectee” list that calls for mandatory secondary screening.

At the time that Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name was recorded in the Tide database in November, an Obama administration official said, there was “insufficient derogatory information available” to put him on the T.S.D.B, no-fly or selectee lists, and so he was not on any watch list when he boarded the plane bound for Detroit.

Republicans on Sunday blamed the Obama administration for a lapse in security. “Homegrown terrorism, the threat to the United States, is real,” Representative Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Select Intelligence Committee, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I think this administration has downplayed it. They need to recognize it, identify it. It is the only way we are going to defeat it.”

Representative Peter King of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, was critical of he Obama administration as well as Ms. Napolitano, who said repeatedly on the Sunday programs that the system had “worked” because passengers jumped on Mr. Abdulmutallab as he tried to ignite a highly explosive powder mixture, PETN, also called pentaerythritol tetranitrate, that he had taped to his leg.

“The fact is the system did not work, and we have to find a bipartisan way to fix it,” Mr. King said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “If that had been successful, the plane would have come down and we would have had a Christmas Day massacre with almost 300 people murdered.”

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said on ABC and NBC that President Obama, who is vacationing in Hawaii, had ordered two reviews, one to look into whether the government did everything it could with the information on Mr. Abdulmutallab, and another on whether revisions are necessary in U.S. security procedures.

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