Three detained on 9/11 included two Indians

NEW YORK: Falling sick and spending long time in the lavatory proved costly for two Indians, who were detained along with a half-Jewish and half-Arab woman by the FBI from a Detroit-bound plane, on the day when America commemorated 9/11 attacks.

The information of the two passengers being Indians came after the third detainee Shoshana Hebshi recounted her ordeal in a detailed blog post in which she says she was taken into custody because of the way she looked and was subjected to racial profiling.

"Silly me. I thought flying on 9/11 would be easy," she writes in her post titled 'Some real Shock and Awe: Racially profiled and cuffed in Detroit'.

She goes on to say that when the flight landed in Detroit, the captain announced a little later that the plane would be moving to a different part of the airport.

She then saw through her window "a squadron of police cars following the plane, lights flashing.

"I turned to my neighbour, who happened to be an Indian man, in wonderment," she says adding that they waited in the plane for half an hour before 10 cops, some in what looked like military fatigues, ran toward the plane carrying the "biggest machine guns I have ever seen".

The police entered the flight and walked towards where Hebshi and her co-passengers were sitting.

"The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained," she added.

In the weekend incident, F-16 fighter jets were scrambled to escort Frontier Flight 623 after crew members reported that two men spent "an extraordinarily long time" in the plane's lavatory in what was termed as suspicious behaviour.