'Pyrotechnic device' found on domestic flight
 

New York (CNN) -- A man was questioned by the FBI after he was discovered to have taken a "pyrotechnic device" onto an airline flight from Baltimore, Maryland, to New York City, FBI spokesman Richard Kolko told CNN Monday.

The incident comes in a period of heightened alert on airlines, following what authorities describe as a failed plot to detonate an explosive device on an international flight into the United States on Christmas Day.

Authorities found that Thomas Ouellette, 67, of Bonita Springs, Florida, brought the pyrotechnic device onto the flight that landed at LaGuardia Airport Sunday night and interviewed him, Kolko said. The device was placed in evidence, and Ouellette was issued a federal summons to appear in federal court, Kolko said.

Robert Nardoza public affairs officer with the U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York, said Monday that no court date had been set for Ouellette, and that the office had no further comment on the case.


http://www.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/12/28...ard/index.html

I was wondering when it was going to make it here. It's much more scary or interesting when a Nigerian (Muslim) guy locks himself up in the bathroom. ;)

Of course, there is no guarantee that it was planted by the alleged individual...he may just be the unlucky sap that sat there prior to anyone cleaning between the damn seat cushions.

Right. But i would be different if his name were Mohammed. ;)

What if a Nigerian (Christian) guy locks himself up in the bathroom?

The man does admit that he carried the fire cracker on board. He claims he did not know that fire crackers could not be carried on board, which very well might be true. Your hypothesis was wrong.

I don;t understand the relevance of your question to what I have posted, but since you asked, my response is that when I hear about a Nigerian Christian guy who locks himself in a bathroom, we will both find out what happens.

“Pyrotechnic device” is a big scary name for a firecracker, which is exactly what it was. Good job on cranking up the fear factor, CNN. :rolleyes:

If it was truly dangerous, the TSA screwed up again over a dozen times by letting this through the checkpoint.



"It was a stupid mistake and I take full responsibility," said the 67-year-old.

Ouellette says the firework had been in his bag for at least five years and he had forgotten all about it. He believes it must have slipped out when a flight attendant handed him his suitcase.

Ouellette says he unknowingly brought the firecracker with him aboard more than a dozen flights and it has flown around the world with him. Nobody has ever stopped him for the firework.

Quick ... someone tell me how WBI would've stopped this guy from bringing an explosive onto an aircraft? :rolleyes:

CNN was running it in their headlines ticker all afternoon yesterday... strangely enough, they didn't interrupt any of their endless banter (and kettle interviews) to focus on it, despite the headline ticker saying, "Stay with CNN for updates..."

That alone made me figure it was a non-event. I mean, they were going gaga over the kid who cut his head with the President--sensationalizing the whole thing left and right ("Ambulances dispatched to the PRESIDENTIAL rental home!!!!!!!")--and this didn't even manage a peep at the time from the on-air bloviators.


That's pretty much what I figured. By calling it a "device," CNN makes it out to be a bomb or IED...

profiling
 

yes Yaatri, but its not non-Muslims trying to blow up aeroplanes!

so let me get this straight.....

so with that, who feels safer now? :rolleyes:

Just Federal office buildings in OKC. :rolleyes:

Question is, how do you profile "Muslim?" Plenty of gents (and ladies) fit the bill of "radical Islamist" without fitting the physical description that is the stereotype of so many Americans' minds.

John Walker Lind, for example... maybe that guy wouldn't be blowing himself up; I dunno. But as "the American Taliban," he wouldn't exactly have been caught by the sort of profiling so many people are calling for. Nor would the Chechnyan women who blew themselves up in that Russian terror attack a few years ago.

No worries, that is the thing with hypotheses, some of them will be wrong. At the time of my post, that information from the individual was not available in any story that I had been able to find.