Posted on 12/27/2004 3:52:18 AM PST by Elle Bee
BY SCOTT FUSARO
Citizen Staff
A jetliner en route from Colombia to Atlanta landed at Naval Air Station Key West Sunday afternoon where federal officials pulled from the plane a passenger believed to be on a government "no-fly" list.
Federal officials were not releasing the identity of the passenger whom FBI and U.S. Customs agents continued questioning after the plane resumed its journey to Atlanta just after 4 p.m., according to officials.
"The name was a positive match on the TSA's no-fly list," said Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman Lauren Stover.
The TSA maintains the list of people wanted for questioning compiled by more than a dozen federal agencies, according to Stover.
FBI spokeswoman Judy Orihuela said there is no warrant for the man's arrest and officials are checking to ensure that the man taken from the plane with his luggage is indeed the person on the no-fly list.
"We have a lot of work to do to try to figure out who he is," Orihuela said.
The Delta Airlines 757 jet from Bogota, Colombia landed at the Boca Chica airfield around 1 p.m., said Naval Air Station Key West spokesman Jim Brooks.
"We got a phone call asking us if we could land a 757 from Colombia to Atlanta because the FBI was interested in somebody on board," said Brooks.
"Base officials were told that there was a passenger on the terrorist watch list," he added.
Colombia, one of the world's leading producers of cocaine, is the scene of a 40-year civil war pitting left-wing insurgents against right-wing militias. The U.S. government has stepped up pressure on narcotics traffickers associated with both sides, funding Colombian military operations, opening criminal proceedings in the U.S. and seeking the extraditions of kingpins and commanders.
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Citizen Staff
Two pieces of unattended luggage caused the evacuation of Key West International Airport for about an hour Sunday afternoon.
The incident caused landing passengers to sit on the tarmac until the airport was re-opened, according to airport and security officials, although the air traffic control tower reported no flight delays.
The luggage, left by a glass wall separating the US Airways counter from the security gate, was discovered around 2:10 p.m., airport general manager Peter Horton said.
Following federal Transportation Security Administration procedures, a bomb technician from the Monroe County Sheriff's Office was called in when the owners of the bags could not be found, Horton said.
An airport security official said the names on the luggage did not match names from passenger lists from the last two days.
Travelers and workers at the airport were herded behind a green chain link fence across the airport parking lot from the terminal, where passengers huddled until the airport re-opened shortly after 3 p.m.
"The bomb tech [examined] the bags and determined there was nothing in them other than clothes," said Horton, adding that the bags belonged to a pair of females who were not from Key West.
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BTTT!
With the TSA, a presumption of incompetence is always in order.
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