???
Does El Al normally not check Irish lasses?
I thought El Al had the tightest security in the world. Is this incorrect?
When did this incident take place? Links?
"Does El Al normally not check Irish lasses?"
That is the point, they check everyone.
"They point to an attempt in 1986 by a Jordanian to send his Irish girlfriend on to an El Al flight with a bomb concealed in her hand luggage without her knowledge.
The woman, Anne-Marie Murphy, was preparing to board an Israel-bound flight at London's Heathrow airport, when she was quizzed by a ticket agent trained to screen passengers.
Since the agent thought her story didn't add up, screeners re-examined her baggage, which an X-ray had cleared and found seven pounds of explosives in the lining."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2097352.stm
"In 1986, Nezar Hindawi, a Jordanian national then residing in Britain, told his pregnant Irish girlfriend to fly to Israel from London and that he would meet her there via Jordan. Before she boarded the El Al jumbo jet in London, it was discovered by airport security that the false bottom of her hand luggage concealed a bomb powerful enough to blow the jumbo jet out of the sky. She told authorities that the hand luggage was a gift from her fiancé Nezar Hindawi and that she could not believe that he would knowingly endanger her or his own unborn child. When Hindawi was arrested he revealed that he was a paid agent for Syria and claimed that he had been specifically instructed by Syria to romance and then impregnate a naive woman who could be utilized as a completely unwitting human bomb and thereby more likely avoid detection by airport security (who then operated according to standardized terrorist profiles). So convincing was the evidence of Syria's hand behind this attempt to obliterate a civilian passenger plane that Britain suspended diplomatic relations with Syria for a number of years thereafter."
http://www.rosenblit.com/ADC_letter.htm
Learn to use Google.
It's my understanding that El Al has the best security record in the airline industry, and their passengers are not randomly patted down. They also allow passengers to use actual metal utensils on the plane. Their secret? Profiling.
"I thought El Al had the tightest security in the world."
Without a doubt, and with personal experience, El Al
DOES HAVE the tightest security in the world.
If you think TSA is intrusive, you haven't seen anything till you've flown El Al. I had a twenty-minute session with two interrogators (and I mean professional interrogators) the first time I flew to Israel. I understood the situation, so it didn't bother me too much. If these guys wanted to know my life's story, I might as well enjoy telling it. But domestic US air travel would become obsolete if we employed the same level of scrutiny as El Al on domestic flights.
Seriously.
Maybe it's because I am one of those people who are eyeing up the 'bleeper' gizmo's before I walk through, and half way down the line wonder if I'm wearing belt that will 'go off', or if my titanium enforced knickers are bullet proof...(well, I heard what you American men are like!!!! *L*)...will set the damn thing off!!!!
Seriously though, when I travel within Europe...I have no probs. When I go trans-Atlantic, I'm invariably picked out for security scrutinising.
Of course, they figure out they just got a nutty Paddy on their hands within seconds.