Housewife & Two Indian Men Detained, Stripped Searched After 9/11 Flight Landed in Detroit

Shoshana Hebshi will never forget where she was on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11. She and two other airline passengers were handcuffed and strip-searched after flying into Detroit on Sunday.
No charges were filed against Hebshi, a self-described "half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio," or the two Indian men sitting next to her, who were flying in from Denver when the crew of Frontier Airlines Flight 623 alerted authorities that they were reportedly behaving suspiciously.
n a blog post titled "Some real Shock and Awe: Racially profiled and cuffed in Detroit," Hebshi, an American citizen, told her tale of temporary detainment, which she had begun to share with Twitter followers in real-time - until handcuffs were placed on her wrists.
Hebshi, a writer and editor and mother of twin sons, didn't know the other two passengers in Row 12. They were Indian men, she wrote. And they didn't know each other. But they got a lot closer when they were all crammed into the back of a squad car.
What happened, according to Frontier spokesman Peter Kowalchuk, begins with a bathroom.
"One of the males, who was not feeling well, got up to use the restroom during the flight. The other male got up at approximately the same time to use the restroom. The female remained seated in her row," the FBI said in a statement.
Crews reported the men sitting next to Hebshi were spending "an extraordinarily long time" in the plane's lavatory, Kowalchuk said.
Amid heightened security fears on the tenth anniversary of the 2001 attacks, no one was taking chances.
•After the plane landed, far from any terminals, the captain told everyone to remain in their seats or "there would be consequences," Hebshi wrote. A group of officers had gathered outside.

Hebshi tweeted from the plane before officers arrested her, instructing her to not bring her phone.
•"Before I knew it, about 10 cops, some in what looked like military fatigues, were running toward the plane carrying the biggest machine guns I have ever seen."
Hebshi sent one more tweet about armed officers as they stormed the plane.
They stopped at Hebshi's row, yelling at the three passengers to get up. Hebshi asked if she could bring her phone; one of the officers told her she couldn't as he yanked her out of her seat.
"What a cliffhanger for my Twitter followers!" she quipped in her blog post.
The three were asked if they had any explosives on them, and then put in the back of a squad car next to the plane.
"The Indian man who had sat next to me on the plane was already in the backseat. I turned to him, shocked, and asked him if he knew what was going on," Hebshi wrote. "I asked him if he knew the other man that had been in our row, and he said he had just met him. I said, it's because of what we look like. They're doing this because of what we look like. And I couldn't believe that I was being arrested and taken away."
"I heard the officers discuss my impending strip search. They needed to bring in a female officer. At least they were following protocol, or something to that nature. Still, could this really be happening?" she wrote.
Hours later, after being strip-searched and interrogated by the FBI and Homeland Security, Hebshi was allowed to leave.
14/09/11 First Coast News

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Categories: Foreign Sep 2011