Explosive rumours
 

There are strong rumours in the forex markets that a Moroccan plane has been found to have explosives on it somewhere in France.
The market often comes up with wacky rumours, so there may well be no truth in it, but has anyone heard anything a little more concrete?

The rumours were right.
This from Reuters.

PARIS, Sept 26 (Reuters) - A plastic explosive was found on
Wednesday on board an airplane which landed in the northeastern
French airport of Metz from Marrakesh in Morocco, sources close
to French police said on Thursday.
Police were running tests to identify the composition of the
small stick of plastic, which did not have a detonator.
Sniffer dogs found the device hidden between two seats
during a check of the aircraft after passengers had disembarked
at around 10:30 p.m. (2030 GMT), one of the sources said.
((Paris newsroom +331 4949 5339, fax +331 5334 0290,
[email protected]))

The BBC link is:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2283070.stm

However News 24 have just said that Royal Air Maroc have said that nothing was found on board.

MG

Has Paris fallen yet?
 

:D .TC

Well they would say that wouldn't they?
ATB, PTC

AIRLINE SECURITY
French Discover Explosives on a Plane From Morocco

By CRAIG S. SMITH
New York Times

PARIS, Sept. 26 — French authorities said today that they had found explosive material during a random check of a Royal Air Maroc jet after it landed in the French city of Metz late Wednesday, raising concerns of another terrorist plot to blow up an airliner.

A bomb-sniffing dog taken aboard the Boeing 737 in the northeastern French city found about three and a half ounces of explosives wrapped in aluminum foil and concealed beneath an armrest between two seats of Flight AT 5764, which had carried 168 passengers from the Moroccan city of Marrakesh on Wednesday evening. No detonator was found on the plane.

In an apparent security lapse, French customs officials in Metz allowed the plane to return to Marrakesh on its scheduled flight Wednesday night before they notified French judicial authorities.

The Royal Air Maroc spokesman said the aircraft involved had flown again today.

An antiterrorism official said that if the French judicial authorities had known of the incident earlier, they would have held the plane in Metz and checked the passengers on the flight today in case the explosives had been planted by one person for detonation by another person boarding later.

The French antiterrorism official would not identify the kind of explosive found other than to say that it contained pentrite, which is made from pentaerythritol, a compound used in the manufacture of explosives as well as insecticides. It was one of the agents found in the shoe of Richard C. Reid, a Briton who tried to detonate explosives hidden in his shoe on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami last December.

A Royal Air Maroc spokesman identified the material found as Plastrite, a pentrite-based explosive used by the French military.

The Metz flight had been chartered by Étapes Nouvelles, a French tour operator that specializes in holidays in North Africa. The plane, which landed in Metz at 10:20 p.m. Wednesday, had flown earlier in the day between Marrakesh and the southern French port of Marseille.

The French antiterrorism official, a magistrate under the Paris prosecutor's antiterrorist division, said investigators would contact all of the passengers who had flown on the aircraft from Marrakesh to Metz and then back to Marrakesh. If no suspects are found, the investigation will be broadened to passengers on the Marseilles flight, he said.

"We don't know how long the substance was on the plane," the magistrate said. He also said that bomb-sniffing dogs did not check all planes landing in France and that the Royal Air Maroc plane had been picked at random.

Sounds as though it could have been left by mistake following a security exercise?

French police have said explosives found
aboard a Royal Air Maroc plane were part of a
failed bomb plot and not just a provocation.

Customs officials using sniffer dogs found the
stick of explosives in between two passenger
seats after the Boeing 747 had landed in
eastern France on Wednesday night.

Initial theories
suggested the
explosives - found
without a detonator -
might have been
intended for
clandestine onward
delivery.

But investigators now
believe it was an
attempt at a bombing.

"This was done to
make a hole in the
plane," a judicial source told news agency
Associated Press.

Mystery

Police are still at a loss as to who secreted the
100-gram stick of explosive, wrapped in
aluminium, aboard the flight to Metz-Nancy
airport from Marrakesh.

Investigations are still continuing into the 160
tourists and crew on board have found no one
with any suspicious record.

Police from Strasbourg and French
anti-terrorist and intelligence services have
extended their search to include passengers on
previous flights that day on the same plane.

Two theories

An early hypothesis was that the explosives
could have been intended for delivery - placed
aboard the plane during an internal flight and
left there for transport during a subsequent
international flight.

But this theory now
appears less likely,
French sources said,
because the risk to
the courier was so
much greater than
that of using other
means of transport.

Investigators are now
tending towards the
more sinister theory
that a later passenger
planned to attach a
detonator to the
explosives while
aboard the plane's next scheduled flight back
to Morocco.

Parliamentary elections taking place in Morocco
on Friday could provide a motive for the plot.

'Shoe bomber's' choice

The explosive found was pentrite, a granular
powder which can be used alone or in
composition with other chemicals such as
Semtex.

Semtex was used in the 1988 Lockerbie
bombing which killed 270 people.

Pentrite is also the substance that was found
in the shoes of Richard Reid, a British man who
allegedly tried to blow up an airliner heading
from Paris to Miami with a bomb in his shoes.

beeb.

Oh no, looks like they are being "peaceful" again