I strongly recommend to be cautious of what one reads when being on a plane.
Don't read the Bible, Quoran, or any other material that could be construed as an intend to do harm.
5 on Plane Are Detained at Newark, but Later Freed
By MANNY FERNANDEZ and KAREEM FAHIM
Published: May 7, 2006
Five men on an American Airlines flight from Dallas to Newark set off a security alert and were detained yesterday after passengers and crew members said they were acting suspiciously and reading flight manuals, officials said.
But officials said they determined that the men posed no threat, and released them. At least four of the men were members of the Angolan military, one official said, and had just finished helicopter training in Texas.
After the plane landed safely at Newark Liberty International Airport at 3:15 p.m., the men were searched, handcuffed and taken into custody by police officers from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport, the authorities and passengers said. The men were eventually interviewed by the F.B.I. and allowed to leave, officials said.
Flight 1874 left Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport around 11:15 a.m. with 121 passengers and 5 crew members.
Steve Siegel, a special agent with the F.B.I. in Newark, said that the five men were speaking in a foreign language — the official language of Angola is Portuguese — and switching seats, and that "between the passengers and the flight crew, there were some suspicions."
Two law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the men also aroused concern because they were reading flight manuals.
One of the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the incident, said the five men — four in the Angolan military, and the fifth an Israeli — had just completed helicopter training at a Bell Helicopter flight school in Texas.
The official said the men were talking among themselves, switching seats, holding manuals and sometimes making hand gestures.
Among the passengers were air marshals and an agent from the Drug Enforcement Administration. After the agents "made themselves known to each other," the official said, they separated, guarding the plane from different posts.
The D.E.A. agent positioned himself at the front of the plane, near the cockpit door, to head off any attack there. Meanwhile, the marshals sat where they could keep watch over the five men.
An air marshal on board notified authorities on the ground that there were five suspicious passengers aboard, said Marc LaVorgna, a spokesman for the Port Authority.
Some passengers interviewed last night said there was nothing suspicious about the men. The men acted like "a group of people traveling together who didn't get seats together," said Barbara O'Reilly, 66, a passenger from Tulsa, Okla. "I was really surprised" that they were taken into custody, she said.
Geri Inness, 59, a former flight attendant who was a passenger, said the men were singled out for no reason. "They looked shocked, like, 'What the hell is going on?' That was the expression they had on their faces," said Ms. Inness, who was returning from a trip to an artist colony in Mexico.
After the plane, an MD-80, landed in Newark, it taxied to a secure and remote area of the airport. Passengers said emergency vehicles surrounded the plane, and their luggage was placed on the tarmac. They said bomb-sniffing dogs screened their luggage as well as the plane after passengers exited the airliner. They were taken by bus to a terminal.
The men were released sometime before 5:30 p.m. One law enforcement official said they caught a connecting flight to Angola. They had no weapons, said Tim Smith, a spokesman for American Airlines.
Madelyn Connolly, 85, a retired teacher from El Paso, said she was sitting next to one of the men in Row 9. The man, tall and muscular in a cap and a red jacket, talked with another man sitting across the aisle from him. After the plane landed, air marshals asked the man closest to her to go with them. She said he did so without protesting.
"They were not one bit suspicious," she said. "You wouldn't think a thing about them."
But Mr. Siegel, the F.B.I. special agent, said he did not fault those who reported the behavior.
"We would never second-guess anyone who sat through this," he said. "We'd rather people report their observations. That's exactly what happened here."
Janon Fisher, Nate Schweber and Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting for this article.