Northwest Issues Alert on Bomb Threat
Northwest Airlines has received a bomb threat against a New Year’s weekend transatlantic flight and is taking security precautions and offering passengers other flights, the carrier said today.
It said Flight 51, scheduled to leave Paris’ DeGaulle Airport on Saturday bound for Detroit, has been threatened apparently in retaliation for guilty verdicts handed down by a Swedish court last week to four Palestinians on bomb charges.
On Dec. 21, 1988, a Pan Am flight was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. Unconfirmed reports linked that attack to the accidental U.S. downing of an Iran Air flight over the Persian Gulf in July, 1988, that killed 290 people.
Relatives of those killed on the Pan Am flight said their loved ones had no warning a bomb had been placed aboard.
A spokesman for Northwest would not provide details of the latest threat, but reports in Sweden and France, citing American and Swedish security sources, said a Northwest office in the United States received a warning from a man speaking English with a Middle Eastern accent.
Gibbons said the 130 passengers with tickets on Flight 51 could rearrange their travel plans without penalty.
The carrier is not planning to cancel Flight 51, he said.
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