Terrorism apparently not involved in Dutch plane incident

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - The interrogation of 12 men who were removed from a Northwest Airlines flight after they aroused the suspicions of air marshals and crew produced no evidence of terrorism, the Justice Ministry said Thursday.

Flight NW0042 to Bombay, India, returned to Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport on Wednesday escorted by Dutch fighter jets, and the 12 were questioned and arrested.

"So far there are no signs that this was a terrorist threat," said ministry spokeswoman Judith Sluiter.

She declined to say why the men remained under arrest, and the investigation was continuing. Authorities have three days to bring the suspects to court or release them. They were held overnight at a detention center at the airport.

A U.S. government official said crew members and air marshals aboard the Northwest DC-10 bound for Bombay saw the passengers trying to use cell phones and passing them among themselves while the jet was taking off. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject.

"It was behavior that average passengers wouldn't do," the official said.

India's CNN-IBN television news channel reported Thursday that all 12 men were Indian-born, although their current residence was not clear.

India's junior foreign minister, Anand Sharma, confirmed that Dutch authorities have provided a list of names to Indian officials, but gave no other details.

"I don't know how close we were, but my gut tells me these people wanted to hijack the airplane," passenger Nitin Patel of Boston told the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper. Patel sat behind the men in business class.

Some of the men had beards but others didn't, and several were in Western clothes, including baseball caps, other passengers told the newspaper.

The mass-circulation De Telegraaf quoted passenger Sarat Menon as saying several of the men spoke Urdu, the language commonly spoken by Indian Muslims and in Pakistan.

"They said that they were on vacation in Tobago," Menon said. "It wasn't immediately clear what was going on. There was no panic. A flight attendant told us to remain seated and to follow the air marshals' orders."

The alert came two weeks after British police said they foiled an alleged plot to blow up several U.S.-bound aircraft simultaneously.

The Northwest captain radioed Amsterdam seeking permission to return with a military escort, and jet fighters were scrambled from a northern military air field.

The Dutch anti-terrorism office said it saw no reason to raise the country's threat level.

In a recording of air control communications, the Northwest pilot declined an offer to put fire engines on standby for the unscheduled landing at Schiphol.

The security alert was the latest among several incidents reported since the alleged terrorism plot was revealed in London. On Friday, a British plane made an emergency landing in southern Italy after a bomb scare, and the U.S. Air Force scrambled jets to escort a United Airlines flight from London to Washington as it was diverted to Boston.

On Tuesday, a flight to New York from Atlanta was diverted to Charlotte, N.C., after a flight attendant found a bottle of water and then smelled something suspicious on the plane. Officials found it was not hazardous.