Posted on 12/27/2009 7:19:25 AM PST by Kieri
A Michigan man who was aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 says he witnessed Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab trying to board the plane in Amsterdam without a passport.
Kurt Haskell of Newport, Mich., who posted an earlier comment about his experience, talked exclusively with MLive.com and confirmed he was on the flight by sending a picture of his boarding pass. He and his wife, Lori, were returning from a safari in Uganda when they boarded the NWA flight on Friday.
Haskell said he and his wife were sitting on the ground near their boarding gate in Amsterdam, which is when they saw Mutallab approach the gate with an unidentified man.
Kurt and Lori Haskell are attorneys with Haskell Law Firm in Taylor. Their expertise includes bankruptcy, family law and estate planning.
While Mutallab was poorly dressed, his friend was dressed in an expensive suit, Haskell said. He says the suited man asked ticket agents whether Mutallab could board without a passport. “The guy said, 'He's from Sudan and we do this all the time.'”
Mutallab is Nigerian. Haskell believes the man may have been trying to garner sympathy for Mutallab's lack of documents by portraying him as a Sudanese refugee.
The ticket agent referred Mutallab and his companion to her manager down the hall, and Haskell didn't see Mutallab again until after he allegedly tried to detonate an explosive on the plane.
Haskell said the flight was mostly unremarkable. That was until he heard a flight attendant say she smelled smoke, just after the pilot announced the plane would land in Detroit in 10 minutes. Haskell got out of his seat to view the brewing commotion.
“I stood up and walked a couple feet ahead to get a closer look, and that's when I saw the flames,” said Haskell, who sat about seven rows behind Mutallab. “It started to spread pretty quickly. It went up the wall, all the way to ceiling.”
Haskell, who described Mutallab as a diminutive man who looks like a teenager, said about 30 seconds passed between the first mention of smoke and when Mutallab was subdued by fellow passengers.
“He didn't fight back at all. This wasn't a big skirmish,” Haskell said. “A couple guys jumped on him and hauled him away.”
The ordeal has Haskell and his wife a little shaken. Flight attendants were screaming during the fire and the pilot sounded notably nervous when bringing the plane in for a landing, he said.
“Immediately, the pilot came on and said two words: emergency landing,” Haskell said. “And that was it. The plane sped up instead of slowing down. You could tell he floored it.”
As Mutallab was being led out of the plane in handcuffs, Haskell said he realized that was the same man he saw trying to board the plane in Amsterdam.
Passengers had to wait about 20 minutes before they were allowed to exit the plane. Haskell said he and other passengers waited about six hours to be interviewed by the FBI.
About an hour after landing, Haskell said he saw another man being taken into custody. But a spokeswoman from the FBI in Detroit said Mutallab was the only person taken into custody.
It IS a strange story but Kurt Haskell is indeed an attorney in Taylor Michigan. An attorney should know what a sharp dressed man looks like :)
I can’t think of a good reason for him to make the story up but neither can I think of a reason for all other media to ignore.
It is possible that the indian man was merely trying to help the would be terrorist.
so far no one really knows so your point is well taken
I am going to give up air travel - enjoy the USA in your Chevrolet.
“The system worked.”
I did a search and nothing came up. Yours is the original posting, this one was a column/report referencing the attorney’s blog. At least SOMEBODY in the press is covering this!
“The country has been under attack twice in 30 days and where is our commander and chief?”
He’s busy with health care, vacation, basketball, lavish White House parties, etc. Someone needs to give a ‘shout out’ and get his attention.
It needs to be shouted from the rooftops...
OBAMA plays while he tells the rest of us to go to hell.
Makes sense. I don’t know anything about airport operations but you’d think that there would be a special area designated for “situations” to include medical emergencies, dealing with unruly passengers, terrorist related incidents, etc. A “special gate” if you will.
He’s like a modern day Nero...fiddling while Rome is burning.
“At least SOMEBODY in the press is covering this!”
Nothing to see here....move on. /sarc
Someone needs to start a thread containing all the information about this terrorist attack that is not being reported by the propaganda-press so that when it disappears we will still have it.
I was on the mlive site reading about it when the guy posted his original comment in the first story.
Mlive then added another story about his eyewitness report.
This is now the updated story after mlive has followed up and checked to make sure the guy is telling the truth.
I should have posted a separate thread on the story yesterday, but I have never started a thread here, only add comments.
There is a separate story out today about a similar incident in India, Saudi gets on plane headed to India, no passport etc.
http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2009/12/commenter_says_he_was_aboard_n.html
“An Indian man in a nicely dressed suit around age 50 approached the check in counter with the terrorist and said “This man needs to get on this flight and he has no passport.” The two of them were an odd pair as the terrorist is a short, black man that looked like he was very poor and looks around age 17(Although I think he is 23 he doesn’t look it). It did not cross my mind that they were terrorists, only that the two looked weird together. The ticket taker said “you can’t board without a passport”. The Indian man then replied, “He is from Sudan, we do this all the time”. I can only take from this to mean that it is difficult to get passports from Sudan and this was some sort of sympathy ploy. The ticket taker then said “You will have to talk to my manager”, and sent the two down a hallway. I never saw the Indian man again as he wasn’t on the flight. It was also weird that the terrorist never said a word in this exchange. Anyway, somehow, the terrorist still made it onto the plane. I am not sure if it was a bribe or just sympathy from the security manager.
FBI also arrested a different Indian man while we were held in customs after a bomb sniffing dog detected a bomb in his carry on bag and he was searched after we landed. This was later confirmed while we were in customs when an FBI agent said to us “You are being moved to another area because this area is not safe. Read between the lines. Some of you saw what just happened.”(The arrest of the other Indian man). I am not sure why this hasn’t made it into any news story, but I stood about 15-20 feet away from the other Indian man when he was cuffed and arrested after his search.”
.
Was it TSA Secy Norman Mineta (Junior)?
John Doe #2...
Because of this terrorist my Grandma is going to be checked to see if she has a condom strapped to her groin.
Well, after the incident, security came running over just as fast as they can; now everybody’s lookin’ for a well-dressed man...
As we all know – thanks to being told so by successive administrations — Islam is the religion of peace*. Thanks to the actions of one brave passenger — who fully understood that he had nothing to lose — this incident remained a small one.
Thanks to PC and the chronic disease known as “Cranial Anal Inversion Syndrome” among most alleged American “leaders” all the way up to the White Mosque — er — House, this “small” incident — and all like it in the future — will disappear down the Orwellian memory hole.
I suspect the primary cause of the failure to put this guy – and only God knows how many more — on a no-fly list is that the folks down the food chain and on the ground who are SUPPOSED to keep these MUSLIM idiots off commercial flights are severely conflicted. On one hand, they are tasked to keep flying safe. On the other, they’ve all had multiple memos and “sensitivity sessions” stressing that they MUST NOT PROFILE but be especially alert to the feelings of Muslims. Any actions taken against them MUST be fully justified and documented. The vernacular expression dealing with that is “CYA.” And so they do — while the rest of us die or, thanks to the actions of a passenger, have a very close call on approach to Detroit.
Compounding the problem is that this particular miscreant was not only a Muslim but a black guy from Nigeria. And the American president is _________ (fill in the correct color) and, having been born to a Muslim father and raised in a Muslim country, sympathetic to the religion of _________. (fill in the appropriate term).
The response to this near-tragedy? Fatherland Security now keeps passengers in their seats for the last hour of the trip!! Great! I suspect sales of Depends will soon spike. Now these folks will die at 35,000 feet and the wreckage will be strewn over hundreds of square miles making it virtually impossible to determine if it WAS an act of mass murder by (select one) an angry Norwegian, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, a Muslim nutcase. A few more of these and the air travel industry will be COMPLETELY dead.
By their INACTION and persistence in their denial that we are at war with a determined and dedicated enemy, these alleged “leaders” have 100% guaranteed that the next one will NOT be “small.”
* BTW, “peace” has two definitions:
1. The absence of conflict or war.
2. The ABSENCE or SUPPRESSION OF RESISTANCE TO SOME FORCE, POLICY, IDEOLOGY or POLITICAL SYSTEM, etc. WITH WHICH ONE HAS AN ABIDING DISAGREEMENT WHICH ONE WOULD OTHERWISE ATTEMPT TO DEFEAT TO THE POINT OF TAKING UP ARMS.
Bump!
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