DETROIT (BNO NEWS) — Two fighter jets intercepted a Detroit-bound passenger plane on Sunday after two or three passengers were observed behaving suspiciously, officials said. It is believed some sort of sexual activity may have been involved.
The incident involved Frontier Airlines Flight 623 from Denver to Detroit, where it landed at around 3.30 p.m. local time. “Two passengers were observed behaving suspiciously [..], spending an extraordinarily long time in the lavatory,” a spokesperson for the airline said. “Authorities were contacted.”
According to witnesses, two men and a woman seated in the same row repeatedly went to the plane’s bathroom and spent a long amount of time there. Law enforcement sources told ABC News that the people were “making out” in the bathroom, and that some sort of sexual activity may have been involved.
Because of the suspicious behavior, the pilot of the plane declared an emergency and fighter jets were scrambled to follow the plane until it landed safely in Detroit. Police armed with machine guns boarded the plane after it landed and directed to a pad a distance from the concourse.
“The policeman said everybody remain seated. Everyone remains seated. If you get out of your seats you will be taken care of quickly,” Marilyn Dietrick, one of the passengers, told WXYZ-TV. “They had us put our hands up on the seats and heads down.”
The three passengers involved in the incident were quickly removed from the aircraft and taken into custody, officials said. They were later released with no charges filed, but officials refused to say what the passengers were doing in the bathroom.
The scare took place on the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger planes before crashing two of them into the World Trade Center in New York and another into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. The fourth, United Flight 93, crashed into a field in Stonycreek Township near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people were killed.
This is a re-run of an episode of 2 and a 1/2 men