Friday
2 Jan 2009
Muslim Family Kicked off Airplane
By Annie Jacobsen in category Federal Air Marshals, Airport Security & Screening
I was on Frank Beckmann's radio show this morning, discussing the Muslim family of nine — men in beards, wives in headscarves — kicked off an AirTran flight out of Reagan National Airport yesterday. The family, called the Irfans, said they were headed to a "religious conference" in Orlando, Florida.
The last high-profile incident of this kind was a little over a year ago, in November of 2006. In that similar incident, a group of Muslim clerics were removed from a flight for saying and doing things that scared other passengers. The men had just been to a "religious conference" in the mid-west; the Irfans were on route to one. The 2006 incident, and subsequent lawsuit, garnered international attention and came to be known as The Case of the Flying Imams.
In yesterday's incident, Fox News reports that one AirTran passenger said "they overheard one member of the [Irfan] family talking about the safest place to sit on a plane if a bomb was on board."
The family denies ever having used the word 'bomb.'
"We're very careful about what we even say on the plane," Atif Irfan, who was kicked off the flight, told MyFOXDC.com. "Even if we were to say that's the bomb, we wouldn't even say that on the plane because we know to avoid certain buzz words, and we're very careful about this kind of stuff so, I don't know where they would have thought this whole incident even started from, quite frankly, what words we used."
Ultimately, even with the FBI advocating on the Irfan's behalf, AirTran refused to let the family fly. They refunded them the price of their tickets and referred them to a different carrier. The airline says it stands by its position.
AirTran spokesman Tad Hutcheson agreed that the incident amounted to a misunderstanding, and he speculated that it probably began because of the passengers' appearance. But he defended AirTran's handling of the incident, which he said strictly followed federal rules. And he denied any wrongdoing on the airline's part.
The TSA is also standing behind the decisions of its two federal air marshals who happened to be on board the flight. According to the Washington Post, the air marshals reported the situation to airport police, which led to a police report on the incident.
As a result of that report, federal officials made the decision to order all 104 passengers from the plane and re-screen them and their luggage before allowing the flight to take off for Orlando — two hours late and without the nine passengers.