French flights to US cancelled due to case of mistaken identity
PARIS (AFP) - US investigators wrongly identified six Air France passengers as potential terrorists, leading to the grounding of six flights between Paris and Los Angeles last week, officials said.
"Sometimes, it's not until you physically ID a person that you find out it is not the person," an FBI (news - web sites) official said on condition of anonymity, backing earlier statements made by the French interior ministry.
But the official from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) insisted the actions taken leading to the cancellation of the flights over the Christmas period were the right ones.
French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday supported that assessment, saying during a visit to Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris: "I much prefer to act too soon rather than too late."
The FBI official explained: "During intelligence collection, you may come up with a particular name and you don't really have much more than that.
"Once you have a piece of intelligence that gives you a name of a person who may be involved in a terrorist threat, you have to act upon that," he said. "I don't think the public would like to take any chance."
In Paris, the interior ministry said the FBI had based its information on passenger lists containing names that were similar to those of suspected Al-Qaeda operatives who appear on US terror watch lists.
"A check was carried out in each case and in each case it turned out to be negative," a ministry spokesman told AFP.
"The FBI worked with family names and some family names sound alike," the spokesman said, noting that some of the names had been transliterated from Arabic, which uses a different alphabet from French and English.
"The difficulty is compounded when you have no first name or date of birth," he said.
The French government agreed after 48 hours of talks with US officials to cancel three Air France flights from Paris to Los Angeles as well as the three return legs operated by the flag carrier on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
The FBI said its information showed that Al-Qaeda activists planned to hijack an Air France plane and crash it on US soil in a suicide strike similar to those carried out on September 11, 2001.
But the Wall Street Journal reported Friday that one of the Air France passengers singled out by the FBI was a child whose name happened to be the same as a wanted Islamic extremist from Tunisia.
The others on the list were an elderly Chinese lady who had at one time run a restaurant in Paris, an insurance salesman from Wales and three French nationals, the paper said.
The FBI official acknowledged that the newspaper's report was accurate.
The cancellations came amid heightened fears of a terror attack over the Christmas period. The United States on December 21 stepped up its national security alert to Code Orange, which warns of a "high risk of terrorist attacks."
British Airways and Aeromexico have both cancelled US-bound flights this week due to security concerns.
Air France resumed its flights to Los Angeles on December 26, but one of its flights from New York to Paris was diverted to Newfoundland on Thursday due to security concerns, Canadian television reported.
In Paris, Sarkozy said France and the United States were exchanging passenger lists for all flights between the two countries, noting: "We are living in a tense period that requires increased vigilance."
"When a friendly nation asks us to step up security on our side, no one can reproach it for that. I prefer that we be criticized for having too many (security) checks than for not having enough," he said.
Washington has called for armed sky marshals to be deployed on foreign flights thought to be at risk, a move defended by Sarkozy.
The Washington Post reported that two Air France flights were escorted by US Air Force F-16 fighter jets when they landed at Los Angeles on Tuesday and Wednesday -- a report indirectly confirmed Friday by France's junior transport minister Dominique Bussereau.
"Currently, the air bases of the countries concerned are on a high state of alert, and it's not unthinkable for civilian aircraft to be followed at a distance by military jets," Bussereau told private radio Europe 1.
"That has been the case in the United States," the minister added.