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2 men arrested at Seattle airport
By MIKE CARTER
Seattle Times
SEATTLE -- Two Pakistani men are being held in Seattle after an airline employee at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport found one of their names on a terrorism-related no-fly list Saturday night.
One of the men, carrying a Canadian driver's license, paid cash for a one-way ticket to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. After the airline employee called 911, the man left the counter, abandoning his ticket.
The other man, who had a New York driver's license, also paid cash for a one-way ticket to Kennedy Airport on a different airline, police reports show.
Police detained both men, then turned them over to the FBI. They are being held on immigration violations as the incident is investigated.
"We are expending all available resources toward the investigation," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Greenberg, a counterterrorism prosecutor in Seattle.
The two men, whose names were not released, both were using Pakistani passports and were seen together at the airport earlier in the evening, police said. After their arrests, the men told investigators they paid to be smuggled into the United States from Canada last month.
The men were arrested about 10 p.m. Saturday in a ticketing area after an American Airlines employee and a ticket agent from another major airline became suspicious and ran the men's names through the government's no-fly database of suspected terrorists.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings, airlines have routinely run security checks on passengers who purchase one-way tickets or use cash. Hundreds of individuals have been briefly detained at airports after their names matched those on the no-fly list, according to records released as part of a lawsuit against the Transportation Security Administration by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Arrests are rare, however.
"This time, it sounds like [the list] really worked," said Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert and senior adviser to the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif. "Hopefully, that makes up for the times that people were irritated. . . .
"Of course, you wonder about these guys," Jenkins said. "They're not particularly clever, coming to the airport to buy one-way tickets and to pay cash."
Seattle Times reporter Chris Maag contributed to this article. |
