Last night..er actually very early this morning they were saying they had 20 in custody and were looking for 2 more.
The 22 just stuck with me.
Long term TM lurker Watchwoman here...just had to chime in with my story which seems particularly fitting now.
My family and I went to Europe on vacation and just last Friday we flew back on a Continental flight from Birmingham England to Newark. I'm SOOOOO glad we did not get caught up in all of this! We had plenty of carry-on luggage filled with all sorts of liquids.
Anyway...there were 4 of us traveling, hubby and me and two teenaged daughters, so we were riding two by two, the girls were in the row behing hubby and me with one empty chair. It stayed empty literrally until the last minute when a young middle-eastern looking man came and took the seat. A little while later, a flight attendant came back to him and said she required an address where he would be staying in the U.S., and she needed to take his passport for "further checks" since he checked in so late. It was NOT filling me with warm fuzzies to have this guy sitting next to my daughters!
Then it got even stranger...a different flight attendant came back with his passport - and she was rebuking him for "leaving it" unattended. He said in his broken English, "No, you take! you take!" but she continued to lecture him about not leaving his passport unattended. At that point, we almost felt sorry for the guy. VERY STRANGE. The rest of the flight was uneventful and we never heard another peep our of him. He nodded and smiled goodbye to my daughters as we gathered our luggage in the terminal after landing.
As the week went on and the news of the Egyptian students unfolded I couldn't help wondering if he was one! Or could there possibly have been trial runs for this latest plot...?
The airline personnel seemed definitely to be on guard, at any rate, but at the same time they didn't seem to have it all together either.