The flight of the Imams grows weirder

Richard Miniter:

THE notorious case of U.S. Airways Flight 300 gets stranger by the minute, as more facts emerge about why six traveling Muslim clerics were asked to deplane.

A passenger on that flight - I'll call her "Pauline" - has inadvertently publicized some facts via a much-forwarded e-mail; she gave me more details in an interview this week. The airport police report confirms some of her claims and holds more revelations of its own. And U.S. Airways spokeswoman Andrea Rader also confirmed much of Pauline's account.

One detail that's escaped most reports is that other Muslim passengers were left undisturbed and later joined in a round of applause for the U.S. Airways crew.

"It wasn't that they were Muslim," says Pauline. "It was all of the suspicious things they did." Sitting by Minneapolis-St. Paul's Airport Gate C9, she noticed one imam immediately. "He was pacing nervously, talking in Arabic," she said.

As the plane boarded, she said, no one refused to fly. The public prayers and an Arabic phone call triggered no alarms.

But then a note from a passenger about suspicious movements of the imams got the crew's attention.

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Contrary to press accounts that a single note from a passenger triggered the imams' removal, Captain John Howard Wood was weighing multiple factors.

* An Arabic speaker was seated near two of the imams in the plane's tail. That passenger pulled a flight attendant aside and, in a whisper, translated what the men were saying: invoking "bin Laden" and condemning America for "killing Saddam," according to police reports.

* An imam seated in first class asked for a seat-belt extender - the extra strap that obese people use because the standard belt is too short. According to both an on-duty and a deadheading flight attendant, he looked too thin to need one.

A seat-belt extender can easily be used as a weapon - just wrap one end around your fist, and swing the heavy metal buckle.

* All six imams had boarded together, with the first-class passengers - even though only one of them had a first-class ticket. Three had one-way tickets. Between the six men, only one had checked a bag.

And, Pauline said, they spread out - just like the 9/11 hijackers. Two sat in first class, two in the middle and two back in the economy section, police reports show. Some, according to Rader, took seats not assigned to them.

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One more odd thing went unnoticed at the time: The men prayed both at the gate and on the plane. Yet observant Muslims pray only once at sundown, not twice.

"It was almost as if they were intentionally trying to get kicked off the flight," Pauline said.

While the imams were soon released, Pauline is fuming: "We are the victims of these people. They need to be more sensitive to us. They were totally insensitive to us and then accused us of being insensitive to them."

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Tucked away in the police report is this little gem: One imam had complained to a passenger that some nations don't follow sharia law and had said his job in Bakersfield, Calif., was a cover for "representing Muslims here in the U.S."

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Anyone who supports shari'a law is a loon. It is a medieval barbaric code where cruel and unusal punishment is the usual. I t still appears to me that these guys were trolling for a law suit. The fact that they just left a conference together suggest that they conspired to crate the disruption. At best they were engaging in a sick joke.

And another thing, why is it that only conservative papers are reporting on these facts? Are liberal papers too wrapped up in political correctness to be concerned with airline passenger safety anymore?