Four People Detained In Bangor

No one was really sure, but federal officials decided it was better to be safe than sorry, so they diverted an Air France flight from Paris to Boston Thursday afternoon. The aircraft with its 169 passengers made an unscheduled stop in Bangor, ME, where they spent less than two hours before continuing on to Boston.

When the Airbus A330-200 landed in Bangor, it was boarded by federal officials who took a man, woman, child and baby off for questioning. Authorities at the US Department of Homeland Security said they realized as the flight was crossing the Atlantic that one passenger's name was spelled only slightly different than the name of a man on the no-fly list. A DHS source told the Washington Post that the passenger's birthday was an exact match. That's when they decided to divert the flight, the source said.

Only after the flight was diverted and the four passengers questioned did DHS officials decide the passenger wasn't the man they thought he was.

"After a thorough interview and review of the facts on the ground by Customs and Border Protection, the individual in question was deemed admissible to the United States," agency spokeswoman Christiana Halsey told the Post.

"They were sitting next to me, they were very normal people, there was nothing fishy about them," passenger Sabiha Bishara told Maine Today. "When the customs agents boarded, the wife was very surprised."

Passengers were notified of the diversion about halfway across the Atlantic, said passenger Bill Silveira of Lakeville, MA. When he asked a flight attendant what was going on, he was told someone was on the plane who shouldn't have been.

FMI: www.dhs.gov