Moments after boarding US Airways Flight 300 for Phoenix, Michael McCombie, a 3M sales rep from Santa Clara, Calif., jotted a note and handed it to flight attendant Terri Boatner:
“6 suspicious Arabic men on plane, spaced out in their seats. All were together, saying '... Allah ... Allah ...’ cursing U.S. involvement w/Saddaam before flight. 1 in front exit row, another in first row 1st class, another in 8D, another in 22D, two in 25 E & F.”
The men in question were six Muslim imams, or prayer leaders, returning home from a conference in Minneapolis. Within minutes of getting McCombie’s note that November evening in 2006, the plane’s captain had the men removed from the flight because of “safety concerns.” Within hours, the airline reversed itself, determined that the men posed no risk, offered to book them on another flight and apologized.
Within days, though, the incident at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport had exploded into controversy. There were claims of discrimination against Muslims and calls for a boycott of the airline, while others contended the men had acted suspiciously and the airline did the right thing. The imams later sued US Airways and the Metropolitan Airports Commission, claiming they had been kicked off the flight and detained by airport police because of their religion, ethnicity and national origin.
In a federal courtroom in Minneapolis on Monday, lawyers for the imams, the airline and the airport commission will argue over an evidentiary issue that must be settled for the case to continue. Lawyers for the imams claim US Airways and the commission have wrongly withheld information in the part of the lawsuit known as discovery.
US Airways and the airport commission claim the imams haven’t provided enough detail about how they were allegedly harmed.
While one lawyer for the imams describes the hearing as “a pretty dry discovery dispute,” the information they seek could help determine what the airline knew and when it knew it. They contend that such information goes to the heart of their claims that they were victims of discrimination.
In short, the plaintiffs want to know what information US Airways Capt. John Howard Wood had when he decided to kick the imams off the plane — and whether that information justified his decision.
“Ultimately, what happened when will be a very important question,” said Frederick Goetz, a Minneapolis lawyer representing the imams. “The whole case will depend upon the facts, not spin, and we’re looking for the facts.”
‘RACIAL PROFILING’
When it comes to safety issues, federal air regulations give pilots wide latitude in determining who can and can’t fly on their planes. But after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. Department of Transportation warned airlines “not to target or otherwise discriminate” against passengers because of religion, race, national origin “or modes of dress that could be indicative of such classification.”
The department said it had seen “several reports of airlines apparently removing passengers from flights because the passengers appeared to be Middle Eastern and/or Muslim.”
Omar Mohammedi, a New York attorney who represents the imams, believes the men were discriminated against because they were Muslims of Middle Eastern descent.
“We are very confident about this case, that there was racial and religious profiling,” Mohammedi said. “We know that after 9/11, Muslims who appear to look Muslim have trouble flying. It was definitely racial profiling — the way they look, the way they pray, the way they spoke.”
US Airways spokeswoman Valerie Wunder said the airline would not comment on the case, and two lawyers representing the airline did not return calls.
In a two-page affidavit he gave in May 2007, Wood, the pilot, said his decision to remove the imams “was based solely on safety concerns” and “was not based on the identified passengers’ race, religion, ancestry, or national origin.”
In a country still jittery about claims of terrorist plots five years after the 9/11 attacks, the Nov. 20, 2006, incident has taken on a mythology all its own. Part of that mythology has been based on early — and, in some cases, erroneous — media reports that were retold and embellished in the blogosphere, on talk radio and elsewhere.
PRAYERS OR CURSES?
Boiled down to its essence, here’s what happened:
On the afternoon of Tuesday, Nov. 20, the imams arrived at the airport for a flight to Phoenix. They had been attending a conference of the North American Imams Federation. They were Omar Shahin, 45 at the time, president of the federation and chairman of the Arabic Department at the Arizona Cultural Academy in Phoenix; Ahmed Shqeirat, 42, an imam at the Tempe Islamic Community Center; Didmar Faja, 26, head of the Albanian American Islamic Center of Arizona in Peoria, Ariz.; Marwan Sadeddin, 55, and Mahmoud Sulaiman, 49, imams at the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix; and Mohamed Ibrahim, 31, an imam in Bakersfield, Calif.
They were cleared through security. Their boarding passes did not have the “SSSS” designation that is the Transportation Security Administration’s post-9/11 code used to identify passengers who should undergo a more in-depth screening. They made their way to Gate C9, where their flight was scheduled to depart at 5:45 p.m.
At about 4:20 p.m., it was time for maghrib, the evening prayer meant for just after sunset. Four of the men prayed while two watched over the group’s belongings.
Muslim prayers, spoken in Arabic, open with Allahu Akbar (“Allah is the greatest”) followed by offers of praise to God and recitation of the opening chapter of Quran. The prayers involve standing, bowing, kneeling, prostrating and sitting and take a few minutes to perform.
McCombie, who did not return calls requesting an interview, later wrote in a statement to airport police that he overheard the men speaking in Arabic in an “angry, heated discussion” in which they mentioned “ ‘U.S.’ and ‘killing Sadaam’ — two men then swore slightly under their breath/mumbled.”
The report gives no indication whether McCombie, 33, spoke or understood Arabic, and the imams deny making the comments.
The men finished praying shortly before the flight was called for boarding. They boarded. McCombie passed his note to the flight attendant, who gave it to the pilot. The pilot called airline security, which called the FBI, and federal agents asked airport police to detain the men until the agents could arrive.
EARLY REPORTS INCORRECT
Buried in the case’s voluminous court file in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis, some facts, or at least things both sides agree on, are starting to emerge. Amid the legalese and lawyerly volleys, it appears that what happened at Gate C9 and aboard Flight 300 wasn’t always what the first reports suggested.
For example, much was made of the fact (and it was something McCombie detailed in his note) that the imams were seated throughout the plane. Stories and columns after the incident likened the spacing to the seats the 9/11 hijackers selected on their flights.
But court records show none of the imams selected his seat; rather, they had six reservations in coach, and the airline assigned them seats. Forty-eight hours before the flight, though, US Airways sent an e-mail to Shahin, a “Gold Elite” member of the airline’s Dividend Miles frequent-flier program, telling him he’d been automatically upgraded to first class.
When Shahin arrived at the gate, he asked whether he could get a similar upgrade for Sadeddin, who is blind and was the oldest in the group. Shahin says the agent at the counter told him that he was entitled to upgrade two of his colleagues but that there were no seats available in first class.
The airline says the ticket agent suggested Sadeddin and Sulaiman be issued economy-class boarding passes and placed on the waiting list for first class.
Similarly, airline officials originally said the men raised suspicions because it appeared Sadeddin, Shqeirat and Faja were traveling on one-way tickets — again, a ploy at least some of the 9/11 hijackers were said to have used.
After a US Airways official passed the ticket information along to the pilot, a customer-service manager discovered it was in error. All six were traveling on round-trip tickets bought weeks before the flight.
The court record so far doesn’t indicate whether the pilot was ever given the corrected information.
In his affidavit, Wood cited the seating arrangement and the supposed one-way tickets as two of the reasons he had the men removed from the plane.
He said he also based his decision on McCombie’s claim that the men made “anti-U.S. comments” in the gate area; that flight attendant Kevin Kelly reported that one of the men had asked for a seatbelt extender even though he didn’t appear to need it, and that Shahin had gotten up to speak with his traveling companions while the plane was delayed on the ground.
(Another imam also asked for an extender, but Kelly thought the man was large enough to need it.)
In a footnote in one of its court filings, US Airways claims an extender — which weighs a bit over 6 ounces, can be purchased commercially and is not among the items barred from being taken on a plane — “can potentially be used as a weapon.” The footnote doesn’t explain how.
Last November, U.S. District Judge Ann D. Montgomery questioned whether the information in the hands of the flight crew and airport police was enough to justify the imams’ removal and arrest. “Again, it is dubious that these facts would lead a reasonable person to conclude that Plaintiffs were about to interfere with the crew of Flight 300,” she wrote in denying a motion by the airline and the airports commission to dismiss the case.
NOTE TRIGGERED INCIDENT
From the pleadings and exhibits filed so far, it appears McCombie’s eight-line note launched the incident. Sworn affidavits from US Airways employees, as well as statements they gave to airport police, show that while airline employees had noticed the imams, they exhibited no behavior that made them suspicious enough to alert the captain — even though US Airways’ InFlight Operations Manual “requires flight attendants to report any unusual or strange passenger behavior to the captain immediately,” the airline said in a court filing.
Boatner, the flight attendant, showed McCombie’s note to two other flight attendants, then took the note to Wood in the cockpit. Wood said he got the note 10 minutes before the flight’s scheduled departure and, after reading it, he asked Kelly, one of the other flight attendants, whether he’d seen any unusual behavior.
In an affidavit, Kelly said he told Wood about the requests for the seatbelt extenders and that Shahin had gotten up a couple of times to go back to the coach section to talk with his friends.
After a US Airways shift manager and ground-security coordinator boarded the plane and talked with the captain, they contacted the airline’s headquarters in Tempe, Ariz., to tell them of their concerns. When a customer-service manager in Phoenix told Wood that three of the men were traveling on one-way tickets, the pilot decided to have the men removed from the plane.
They were taken off the airplane by airport police, held briefly in the jetway, handcuffed, then escorted back onto the plane so they could identify their carry-on luggage. (One imam had checked bags.) After that, they were taken to airport police headquarters.
There, agents from the FBI and U.S. Secret Service questioned them. After determining that the men posed no threat, the agents told them they were free to go.
The imams returned to the terminal and called US Airways to rebook their return to Phoenix. The airline refused to rebook them, and the men left the airport and spent the night at a friend’s home.
At 11:59 p.m., US Airways says a man identifying himself as Federal Air Marshal Dan Ouse, identified as one of the agents involved in questioning the imams, called the airline’s reservation number and requested rebooking for the six. He was told that since the airline had no way to verify his identity — and because it was late and all the executives were gone — it couldn’t rebook the men.
The next morning, Shahin called the airline about 6 a.m. and tried to book seats for the imams, but the airline again refused, telling them they had not been cleared to fly by the airline’s security office.
About 9:50 a.m., after alerting the media and with TV cameras and reporters in tow, the imams approached the US Airways ticket counter and tried to buy tickets to Phoenix. Again, they were refused.
The six eventually booked seats on a Northwest Airlines flight.
EXECS CONFER, AIRLINE APOLOGIZES
Less than an hour after the imams were turned away from the US Airways ticket counter, 15 airline executives, including two senior vice presidents and five vice presidents, held a conference call, determined the men “had been cleared to travel by law enforcement” and decided to offer to rebook them, the airline says in court papers.
Henri Dawes, the airline’s director of customer relations, based in Tempe, phoned Shahin and told him the airline had decided to rebook the six. Shahin told her they’d already gotten seats on a Northwest flight.
“At approximately 12:45 p.m. MST, I personally met the six individuals upon their arrival at PHX (Phoenix) and apologized for the inconvenience,” Dawes wrote in a May 2007 affidavit. “I relayed US Airways’ offer to pay for the individuals’ Northwest tickets and any hotel expenses for November 20, 2006. Mr. Shahin declined this offer.”