Incidents Have Asians, Muslims Feeling Targeted
By Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 25, 2006
LONDON, Aug. 24 -- At an airport in Spain, a terrified 12-year-old girl began crying and pointing at two passengers, both Muslim college students, fueling a panic that led to their removal from the plane. A West Virginia airport terminal was evacuated when officials wrongly suspected that luggage belonging to a woman of Pakistani descent contained liquid explosives. A Muslim doctor was escorted off a United Airlines flight in Denver after passengers became suspicious when he recited prayers.
A growing number of these kinds of incidents in recent days suggest how jittery and suspicious air travelers have become. Since British police announced earlier this month that they had broken up an alleged plot by young British Muslims to bomb jetliners flying from Britain to the United States, passengers and pilots are reporting high anxiety in the skies.
Some say the feeling is an understandable response to extraordinarily unsettling events involving airplanes, beginning with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But many Muslims -- and even Sikhs and other non-Muslim people who appear Asian -- say they are suffering for doing nothing more than "TWA: traveling while Asian."
"They were looking at us like we were going to blow them up," said Sohail Ashraf, 22, a student at the University of Manchester and one of the two men, both British, removed from the plane in Malaga, Spain. Ashraf, who was returning from a quick break after exams, said armed security agents escorted him off the Monarch Airlines flight to Manchester, England.
"When people see brown skin they get scared," Ashraf, who was born in Britain and has Pakistani roots, said in an interview.
Ashraf said he fit the ethnic profile of many of the suspects arrested earlier this month in the airline bomb plot. But that, he said, doesn't make him guilty: "I hate terrorists."
Ashraf said an elderly woman sitting next to him on the plane started staring intently at him when he began speaking to his friend, Khurram Zeb, 22, in Urdu. "She even started questioning me -- like how long I was in Malaga, and when I said, 'One day,' she clearly thought that was weird," he said.
Other passengers reported that the students, who were wearing jeans and light jackets, and not the shorts and beach attire of most of the passengers, stood out and seemed suspicious. After the 12-year-old girl started crying and pointing at them, Ashraf said, "10 people came toward our seats and stared at us in a bad way."
An airport official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the atmosphere on the plane was so "nasty" that the men, even though they had cleared security and were actually "sweet," had to be asked to leave the plane because passengers were leading a mutiny.
"It's right that people are on guard," said Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain. But he said that "security action must be intelligence-led, not appearance-led."
"These cases are a symptom of a wider hysteria in certain quarters," Bunglawala said, describing a feeling among some people that Muslims are a "a huge reservoir of potential terrorists waiting to slaughter fellow citizens."
On Wednesday, Dutch F-16 jet fighters were scrambled to escort a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Bombay when passengers became alarmed that several passengers were passing a cellphone around after the flight took off. The plane was diverted back to Amsterdam, and 12 men from India were taken into custody. Dutch officials released all of them Thursday and said the incident was not related to terrorism.
Not all suspicion aboard planes is focused on Muslims. Catherine Mayo, 59, a woman from Vermont who was wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt, provoked a major security scare with erratic behavior on a flight last week from London to Washington. Mayo made what some passengers interpreted as references to al-Qaeda, and the flight was escorted to Boston by two U.S. F-15 fighter jets.
"Passengers are apprehensive and cautious, and one of the reasons is that they've been told to be," said Nancy McKinley, a spokeswoman in Dallas for the London-based International Airline Passengers Association. McKinley said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, she has found herself watching other passengers board instead of reading a book, and she thinks other passengers do the same.
Often, pilots have to make the call to divert the plane or eject passengers, which has made their work "more difficult and pressured," said Keith Bill of the British Air Line Pilots Association.
Bill said pilots have been subjected to the same rigorous new security measures that passengers face, such as a ban on liquids and gels -- including such basics as toothpaste and contact lens solution. "It's crazy," Bill said. "If we want to crash a plane, we don't have to mix liquids."
Bill said representatives of pilots associations, airlines and British government officials were meeting Thursday to discuss issues raised by the recent security scares, "including questions such as, 'Have we gone overboard with security?' "
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