A man from West Africa who boarded a New York-bound flight in Senegal was added to the no-fly list while the plane was already heading over the Atlantic Ocean, according to a passenger on the flight and\u00a0two sources with knowledge of the situation.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday night, Delta Airlines Flight 215 departed from Abuja, Nigeria, stopping later in Dakar, Senegal, before heading for John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, according to Delta’s website.<\/p>\n
The plane made an unplanned stop in Puerto Rico. Delta’s website said the plane was “diverted,” but a statement from Customs and Border Protection called it a “routine refueling stop.”<\/p>\n
“The plane did not have enough gas to make it to New York because the winds,” one of the passengers on the plane, Joan Mower, told Fox News. “It was a small plane, and it was strong winds. … We couldn’t make it direct from Dakar to New York.”<\/p>\n
After the refueling, there was a “big sort of kerfuffle,” said Mower, who works for Voice of America and was on her way home from a week-long business trip in Nigeria.<\/p>\n
CBP officers boarded the plane and removed what\u00a0the CBP statement called a “potential person of interest.”<\/p>\n
“Then the pilot came on and said, ‘We’ve been delayed some more, because there was someone who got on the plane, and we were just told they added him to the no-fly list after he was on the plane,'” Mower said.<\/p>\n
In fact, Mower said, the pilot described it as “a serious security risk.”<\/p>\n
Mower was unable to see the man who was taken off the plane, she said.<\/p>\n
“The question for Homeland Security, I think, is ‘Why was the guy allowed to get on the plane in [Africa], and then added to the no-fly list while the plane was in the air?,'” she said.<\/p>\n
Two sources confirmed to Fox News that the man in question, a citizen of Gambia, had been added to the no-fly list while Flight 215 was in the air.<\/p>\n
The man had already been on the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list, which is comprised of more than 500,000 people with even limited ties to known terrorists, one source said.<\/p>\n
“But there’s a low threshold to get on TIDE,” one source said.<\/p>\n
In addition, one source said, in the aftermath of the attempted Christmas Day bombing, being added to the no-fly list is\u00a0sometimes a precaution, rather than an indication of a present threat.<\/p>\n
“They’re putting more people on [there] if they have any sort of connection to anyone they deem might be a threat,” the source said. “Until [authorities] run the leads and determine [he] is not a jihadi, he could be on the list.”<\/p>\n
In fact, both sources said, this could be a situation where someone knowingly relayed false, but negative, information about the man.<\/p>\n
In this case, the FBI received a tip from someone shortly before Flight 215 left for the United States, according to one source.<\/p>\n
“Someone suggested that this was a bad guy … and could\u00a0potentially be involved in some kind of security incident,” one source said. “What choice does that leave?”<\/p>\n
As of Thursday evening, the man was still in the custody of CBP. Authorities had yet to find anything to corroborate the claim that he posed a threat, but the investigation is ongoing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A man from West Africa who boarded a New York-bound flight in Senegal was added to the no-fly list while the plane was already heading over the Atlantic Ocean, according to a passenger on the flight and\u00a0two sources with knowledge of the situation. On Wednesday night, Delta Airlines Flight 215 departed from Abuja, Nigeria, stopping […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4536,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-540379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4536"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}