9 DECEMBER: VANCOUVER George Campbell, 45, and Paul Alexander Wilson, 38, each pleaded guilty to mischief for disrupting an Air Canada flight from Toronto to Beijing on 28 November, resulting in it diverting to Vancouver, and were ordered to pay $72k in restitution. They also received suspended sentences and were placed on probation for a year. The two men were on a week-long business trip for Research in Motion, the manufacturers of BlackBerry.


10 DECEMBER: DETROIT


A 76-year- old man was identified by TSA screeners, and arrested, for trying to go through security


with a loaded .38 calibre Ruger Prescott firearm concealed in an ankle holster.


12 DECEMBER: BOSTON Kurt Haberstroh, 20, was charged with interfering with the performance of duties of the crew on a Delta Airlines flight bound for Amsterdam on 17 November. He had allegedly physically attacked his companion, sworn and refused to obey crew instructions. Upon landing in Amsterdam, Haberstroh was denied entry into the Netherlands and was returned to the United States.


13 DECEMBER: BURBANK Michael R. Cobb, 68, was arrested at Bob Hope Airport after an unregistered .40-calibre Glock G23, loaded with 10 rounds, was allegedly found in his carry- on bag when he went through security to board an Alaska Airlines flight to Seattle.


14 DECEMBER: ITALY Valery Tolmachev, the Kazakh diplomat who tried to hijack an Alitalia flight to Libya in April 2011, was cleared of criminal charges after being ruled mentally ill. He was transferred from a prison psychiatric ward to a public hospital in Rome for three months treatment.


15 DECEMBER: NEW YORK Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler, 49, was arrested after he tried to check in for a Delta flight to Detroit with a locked gun box containing a Glock pistol and 19 cartridges of ammunition. Meckler had declared the firearm but, although he was licensed to carry the gun in California, the license was not valid in New York.


16 DECEMBER: FARGO, NORTH DAKOTA Eder Rojas, the Compass Airlines flight attendant who set a fire on board a flight between Minneapolis-St. Paul and Regina in 2008, was sentenced to 74 months in prison, followed by three years of supervision by probation authorities.


19 DECEMBER: NEW DELHI S. Marodia was arrested for allegedly slapping a female ground handling agent who had informed him that Jet Airways would not be liable for the safety of the fragile items he was checking in.


19 DECEMBER: WASHINGTON


TSA screeners found two throwing daggers hidden in a hollowed-out hardcover book at a checkpoint at


Reagan-Washington National Airport. 21 DECEMBER: NEW YORK


Theophilus Maranga filed a US$10 million lawsuit against Delta Airlines and Air France- KLM for injuries he claims he sustained whilst helping to stop Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from blowing up a plane on Christmas Day 2009. The lawsuit said Maranga lost a tooth and suffered injuries to his ribs, permanent numbness in his hands and a pain in his neck that hampers his movements. It accuses the airlines of negligence for allowing a bomber to board their aircraft with an explosive device.


22 DECEMBER: LISBON Portugal's Supreme Court refused a request to extradite hijacker, and convicted killer and fugitive, George Wright back to the U.S. on the basis that Wright, 68, had become a Portuguese citizen and the statute of limitations on his 15- to 30-year sentence for a New Jersey robbery-murder had expired.


23 DECEMBER: SINGAPORE


Reports emerge that Sergei Serkov, 35, the Ukrainian national


arrested on 15 November for groping a female flight attendant on a flight from Moscow to Singapore, might have faced two years in prison and be lashed. However, on 30 January, the case was discharged when he paid the victim $10,000 and gave an open court apology.


23 DECEMBER: DUBLIN


Ann Murphy, the woman who was duped into carrying an IED on to an El Al aircraft in 1986, claimed in the High Court that she had been defamed


on an internet site owned by the Washington Post Company. The claim is that, in an article describing the Israeli approach to security, the Israelis had “actually caught a terrorist red-handed”, implying that Ms Murphy was actually a terrorist.


24 DECEMBER: DALLAS A 14-inch sword, concealed in a cane, was detected at Dallas/Fort Worth. The passenger had, however, previously managed to board a flight from Corpus Christi to Dallas with the weapon undetected. He was arrested.


31 DECEMBER: MIDLAND, TEXAS Trey Scott Atwater, a 30-year-old Army-trained


demolitions expert and member of the elite Green Berets, was arrested when the TSA identified that he had explosives in his carry-on luggage while trying to board


an American Eagle flight from Midland International Airport to Dallas. He was charged with attempting to board an aircraft with explosives.


1 JANUARY: NEW YORK


Sihui "Hannah" Xie, a college student from China, was arrested trying to carry a combination stun gun and flashlight onto a flight from JFK to Orlando.


February 2012 Aviationsecurityinternational www.asi-mag.com 5


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52