LOS ANGELES, 26 December 2003 — The French government on Wednesday canceled six Air France flights between Paris and Los Angeles after US intelligence warned that as many as half a dozen passengers on one flight might be Al- Qaeda or Taleban terrorists, authorities said.
Top US security officials said the cancellations may have foiled a Christmas Eve attack on an unspecified target in Los Angeles.
Details remained cloudy, but US counterterrorism 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 several senior US counterterrorism officials, was based on reliable and corroborated information from several sources. Some of the men had the same names as suspected members of Al-Qaeda and the Taleban, the officials said.
One of the men is believed to be a trained pilot with a commercial license, a senior US security official said.
Law enforcement and intelligence officials in the United States said the information of a pending attack on Los Angeles prompted the federal Department of Homeland Security last week to ratchet up the nation’s terror alert level to the second-highest level. “This whole thing is the reason we got bumped up to orange,” the senior US security official said.
Motivated by fear of a major attack on the United States, hundreds of US intelligence operatives and law enforcement officials around the globe worked on high alert, scouring intercepted communications and interviewing informants. Intelligence officials characterized the effort, which culminated in the flight cancellations, as a nerve-racking race against time.
US law enforcement officials said authorities at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris detained some of the approximately 200 passengers and crew from Flight 68 for questioning. There were conflicting reports about whether any of them were taken into custody.
It also 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, a US intelligence source said. One official said at least six suspicious men were detained in Paris after checking in for the flight.
US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said investigators became interested in the flight after intercepted “chatter” among suspected terrorists led US 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 US secretary of Homeland Security, has warned that Al- Qaeda might attempt to use airplanes against US 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 Taleban and others with names linked to Al-Qaeda, sources said.
“What are the odds that you would get that many hits if there was nothing going on?” asked one counterterrorism official.
With that information, US 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 other flights bound for Los Angeles, because the original intelligence information warned of more than one jet 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.”
French officials seemed to go out of their way to emphasize that cooperation, notable in light of the tense relations between the two countries since the United States decided to go to war in Iraq.
Said Nathalie Loiseau, press counselor in the French Embassy in Washington: “The decision to cancel flights of course is not an easy decision, but it is easy to take when there is a threat. ... Our American counterparts do believe there is a serious threat and that is enough. They are our partners in the war on terrorism, and this time the information is coming from the American authorities and we believe them.”
French investigators would not say whether arrests had been made. They would only say that US 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 underway Wednesday night at Charles de Gaulle Airport, authorities said.
“We have looked at everyone on these flights carefully,” a French law enforcement official said. The potential threat “is consistent with” recent warnings by the US Department of Homeland Security of Al-Qaeda plots to use planes as weapons, the official said.
“Everybody is taking this very seriously,” the French official said. “It’s consistent with the concern about an increased threat of targeting by Al-Qaeda.”
Altogether, six flights between Paris and Los Angeles on Wednesday and yesterday 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.
US officials said they also were concerned that other flights heading toward Los Angeles at the same time, including one from Mexico, also might be targets of planned Al-Qaeda 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.
Unusual precautions had been taken Tuesday when Air France Flight 68 — the flight at the center of the investigation Wednesday — arrived at LAX, a government official said. The plane was not allowed to dock at the terminal, but instead was escorted by law enforcement personnel to a remote hangar at the west end of the airport for special screening of passengers and baggage.
“There was a police presence around the plane, including FBI and customs agents, and there was screening at a level comparable with what we would do on an outbound flight,” the official said.
