BOSTON, 24 December — It was the smell of sulfur that first alerted the flight attendant to the tall, unkempt man in row 29. Until then, everything had gone uneventfully on board American Airlines Flight 63. The plane had taken off more than an hour and a half late from Paris — for reasons that were not entirely clear yesterday — but once airborne it had cruised across the Atlantic without a hitch for more than four hours en route to its scheduled destination, Miami.
Still, the flight attendant did not waste any time. Perhaps her vigilance was heightened by warnings of possible attacks on airliners over the Christmas period; perhaps the shock of the catastrophic events of Sept. 11 was enough in itself. She looked over at the man and saw that the smell was emanating from a lighted match. The man, a gangly 6 ft 4, appeared to be on the verge of setting light to the tongue of one of his shoes. A wire was protruding out from under his foot.
Immediately, she challenged him. The man, named by French police sources yesterday as Tariq Raja, a Sri Lankan national flying on a false British passport, grew hostile and bit her. The flight attendant screamed. And then something remarkable happened. The same instinct that had sharpened the attendant’s senses kicked in with the passengers in the immediate vicinity. As one of them later said: "It was like everybody knew what they needed to do. It was pure instinct because it goes so fast." Eric Debry, a Frenchman sitting with his wife and two children in the row immediately behind the suspect, reached out and pulled his arm back. A crew member rushed over and threatened to spray the man with a fire extinguisher. Several passengers grabbed their drinks and threw them over him to make sure the light from the match had gone out.
The bitten flight attendant had shouted out: "I need some help! I need some help!" And she got it. A half-dozen burly men, some crew members and some passengers, wrestled the suspect to the ground. "I jumped on his shoulder," Debry said later. "Two other guys came and took his legs." Another 20 people pulled the belts out of their trousers and offered them up to help tie the man down. Others produced plastic packing strips — anything they could find that looked like it might be helpful in restraining him. The man shouted out that he was "wired", but if he had meant to scare people into backing off, he was unsuccessful.
Two physicians on board volunteered their services to inject the man with sedatives from the plane’s medical supplies. They gave him three injections in all. And then things began, peculiarly, to return to normal. Some of the passengers searched the man and found the British passport, issued in Belgium three weeks ago, in the name of Richard Colvin Reid. Nobody believed that was who he really was. The man said he was Jamaican, but nobody believed that either.
The captain announced that the flight was being diverted to Boston, the closest destination, which was roughly two hours’ flight time away. He said people should not be alarmed if they saw military jets in the skies near them — and indeed as soon as Flight 63 hit US airspace, it was intercepted by two F-15 fighter jets from Otis Air Force base in Massachusetts and escorted for the remainder of the flight. To try to take the passengers’ minds of what had happened, the frothy Reese Witherspoon comedy "Legally Blonde" was put on the in-flight movie system.
Meanwhile, the crew and a couple of passengers took turns guarding the man in row 29. According to Thierry Dugeon, a 36-year-old French television journalist who was one of the first to overpower him, he was wearing high-top basketball-style shoes made of black suede. Later, when the plane landed and the bomb squad arrived, it turned out that the shoes had been drilled with holes and stuffed with detonation cord and what one official characterized as "improvised explosives".
Once the plane landed at Boston’s Logan airport, it taxied to a remote area until the police arrived. Two flight attendants, the woman who was bitten and a colleague caught up in the melee, were taken to hospital to treat their injuries, which did not appear to be serious. The suspect’s shoes were x-rayed and his carry-on bag, including two audio cassettes, taken away for inspection by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He had no checked luggage, airport officials said.
As investigators sought to identify the explosive yesterday and establish whether the suspect was acting alone or as part of a broader conspiracy, few people who had undergone the ordeal felt particularly good about taking to the skies any time soon. The father of one passenger, Allison Cohen, told reporters she was "less than thrilled" about taking another flight. "She was actually anxious about going on this trip," Jeff Cohen said. "She had reservations, but she went." (The Independent)
