Libya Charges U.S. Warplanes Buzzed Airliner

Libya charged Friday that U.S. fighter jets buzzed one of its civilian jetliners over the Mediterranean Sea en route from Tripoli to Istanbul, Turkey.

The fighters came from the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, but a Navy spokeswoman denied they buzzed the airliner.

A Libyan Airlines Boeing 707 had just left Tripoli airspace Tuesday on a scheduled flight to Istanbul when the captain saw a U.S. fighter plane flying past and then behind his aircraft, said the official Libyan news agency Jana, monitored by the British Broadcasting Corp. in London.

Moments later, two U.S. fighters appeared and flew alongside the airliner at a distance of about 10 miles for 14 minutes, Jana said, based on a statement by Libya’s General Popular Committee for Communications and Maritime Transport.

The captain reported the incident to flight controllers in Athens, the statement said.

In Washington, Navy spokeswoman Lt. Janet Mescus denied that American warplanes buzzed the airliner but said fighters from the Kennedy may have flown alongside the craft to obtain visual identification.

“We routinely visually identify any aircraft that flies within a given radius of the carrier,” Mescus said. “We don’t buzz aircraft. We wouldn’t term it as buzzing. It might be possible that we would have done that (flown alongside), but we were not buzzing the aircraft at all.”

Jana said the government filed protests with the Arab civil aviation and the international civil aviation organizations condemning the behavior of the U.S. fighters, “which endangered the safety of the airliner.”

Another such incident “will be considered a threat against international air navigation over the Mediterranean,” Jana said.

The charges came as a major naval exercise of the U.S. 6th Fleet entered its second day in the Mediterranean on Friday. The maneuvers, taking place near Sicily, involve 28 ships, including the Kennedy and another carrier, the Theodore Roosevelt, and 150 U.S. aircraft from those ships and from American shore bases.

The Pentagon says the exercise, called “National Week,” had been planned for months and was designed for ships just taking up duty in the Mediterranean.