Suspicious Camera Leads to United Flight Diversion
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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images(BOSTON) — A United Airlines flight from Newark, N.J., to Geneva, Switzerland, was diverted to Boston Tuesday night when a flight attendant discovered a camera in a seat back pocket and could not locate the camera’s owner, law enforcement officials and an airline spokesperson said.
United Airlines later identified the owner of the camera as it belonged to someone who flew on an earlier flight.
Richard Walsh, media relations representative for Massachusetts Port Authority, confirmed to ABC News that the flight to Geneva is scheduled to take off from Boston’s Logan International Airport at 3 p.m. Wednesday.
The Boeing 767 has not yet departed Boston and it wasn’t clear if that same plane will be used for the flight to Geneva.
Flight 956 took off from Newark at 6 p.m., with 157 passengers and 11 crew members aboard, according to officials and United’s website. The plane was escorted to Boston by two F-15’s at 9:00 p.m. and landed approximately 15 minutes later “as a prudent precaution,” according to NORAD.
But during the flight into Logan, there was another moment of concern — one of the fighter escorts lost its avionics and issued an emergency, but NORAD said it was able to land safely at its home base.
Cameras are an object of concern for counter terrorism authorities. In one of the post 9/11 airline terror plots, terrorists explored using camera bodies either as devices or as part of the mechanism for triggering a bomb.
More recently, ABC News has reported, al Qaeda bombmaker Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who is believed to be behind both underwear bomb plots, was working on new explosives that they hoped would pass an airport security screening. One of those designs reportedly utilized a camera.
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio