Al-Qaida may have targeted L.A. jet

Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, December 24, 2003

LOS ANGELES — The French government on Wednesday canceled six Air France flights between Paris and Los Angeles after U.S. intelligence warned that as many as half a dozen passengers on one flight might be al-Qaida or Taliban terrorists, authorities said.

Top U.S. security officials said the cancellations may have foiled a Christmas Eve attack on an unspecified target in Los Angeles.

Details remained cloudy, but U.S. counter-terrorism officials said their investigation was focusing on the "informed belief" that about six men on Air France Flight 68, from Paris to Los Angeles, may have been planning to hijack the plane and crash it near Los Angeles, or along the way.

That belief, according to one senior U.S. counter-terrorism official, was based on reliable and corroborated information from several sources. Some of the men had the same names as identified members of al-Qaida and Taliban, said a senior U.S. official.

One of the men is a trained pilot with a commercial license, according to a senior U.S. official.

Law enforcement officials in the United States said the flights were canceled in response to the same intelligence that prompted the federal Department of Homeland Security to ratchet up the nation’s terror alert level to orange, the second highest level.

Other U.S. law enforcement officials said authorities at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris detained some of the 200 passengers and crew from Flight 68 for questioning. There were conflicting reports about whether any of them were taken into custody.

It was unclear late Wednesday whether the men being sought had boarded the flight, or were "scared off" by reports that Los Angeles had been identified as a possible target, said a U.S. intelligence source.

American officials said investigators became interested in the flight after intercepted "chatter" among suspected terrorists led U.S. intelligence to believe an attack might be imminent. The chatter included a specific reference to Flight 68, according to one federal law enforcement source. The flight arrives daily at Los Angeles International Airport at 4:05 p.m.

Tom Ridge, the secretary of Homeland Security, has warned that al-Qaida might attempt to use airplanes against U.S. targets, as it did on Sept. 11, 2001.

When FBI counterterrorism agents began reviewing Wednesday’s manifest for Flight 68, they discovered that the passenger list included at least one name similar to that of a person linked to the Taliban and others with names linked to al-Qaida, sources said.

"What are the odds that you would get that many hits if there was nothing going on?" asked one counterintelligence official.

With that information, U.S. authorities contacted French intelligence about the possibility that suspected terrorists might be on the flight. They prevailed upon Air France to cancel Flight 68, as well as others bound for Los Angeles, since the original intelligence information warned of more than one flight being commandeered.

The cancellations were announced by the office of French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, which said the action was "based on information in the process of verification obtained as a result of Franco-American cooperation against terrorism."

Altogether, six flights between Paris and Los Angeles on Wednesday and today were affected. Three round-trip flights were canceled: Flights 68, 69 and 70, which was scheduled to stop in Tahiti. Air France scrambled to find passengers seats on other carriers, but the cancellations forced some people to delay travel by a day or more.

The French government decided to cancel the flights based on information from U.S. law enforcement, authorities in Paris said. French investigators would not say whether arrests had been made. They would only say that U.S. and French investigators were working together and that the passengers and crew on the Air France flights had been subjected to close scrutiny.

Interrogations and searches of passengers’ baggage were still under way at Charles de Gaulle airport Wednesday night, authorities said.

"We have looked at everyone on these flights carefully," a French law enforcement official said. The official said the potential threat "is consistent with" recent warnings by the U.S. Homeland Security Department of al-Qaida plots to use planes as weapons.

"Everybody is taking this very seriously," the French official said. "It’s consistent with the concern about an increased threat of targeting by al-Qaida."

U.S. officials said they were particularly concerned that other flights heading toward Los Angeles at the same time, including one from Mexico, might also be targets of planned al-Qaida hijackings. But they stressed that the information was not as specific and credible as the intelligence indicating that Flight 68 was targeted for a takeover.

"There was little doubt in anybody’s mind that L.A. was the target of this one," said one senior U.S. counter-terrorism official involved in the investigation. "We believed they were going to take the aircraft over to the West Coast and that they were going to fly it into something in L.A."