No Terrorists Boarded Air France Flight

After an exhaustive investigation, federal law enforcement authorities have concluded that there were no known terrorists among the passengers ticketed on an Air France flight bound for Los Angeles that was canceled Christmas Eve because of fears that it might be commandeered for an attack, a senior U.S. government official said Thursday.

“In the universe of people we know about, none of them were on that plane, and no one on that plane had the capability to do anything,” the official said.

The disclosure came a day after French investigators said they were searching for a passenger who did not show up for Air France Flight 68 and had the same name as a Taliban fighter who had escaped from U.S. custody in Afghanistan.

The ticketed passenger was later located by French investigators and “turned out to be a regular guy,” the U.S. official said.

While authorities will continue to take extra security steps if intelligence suggests a threat to specific flights, counterterrorism officials have said that the handling of Flight 68 was a particularly extraordinary case because reports that it may have been targeted by Al Qaeda came from several sources and the names of some passengers were similar or identical to those of known terrorists.

Concerns about the flight prompted U.S. and French officials to initiate a series of security precautions and set the stage for a tense week of international air travel, with more than a dozen flights from France, Mexico and Britain ultimately canceled as a result of intelligence reports suggesting that they might be terrorist targets.

The cancellations began several days after the Department of Homeland Security, citing renewed concern about possible attacks by Al Qaeda, raised the threat warning in the U.S. to its second-highest level.

The senior U.S. official confirmed Thursday that the FBI and other investigating agencies were operating with few details when they sought to head off an attack that seemed possible based on intelligence derived from several undisclosed sources. Apart from a specific warning about Air France Flight 68, the official said, “All we had were names” of passengers that matched those of extremists.

With those names, French authorities -- at the urging of the U.S. -- scoured the aircraft and interviewed an estimated 200 passengers and crew aboard the flight set to depart from Charles de Gaulle Airport. “They had nothing on the plane, nothing in their luggage, nothing on their bodies,” the official said. “If somebody slipped by that we did not know about before, they were completely neutered in terms of having any capacity to adversely affect that aircraft.”

In Paris, French police officials Thursday played down the possibility that a ticketed passenger could be a suspected terrorist, despite the French justice minister’s comments Wednesday about a search for a no-show passenger.

And as in previous days, French law enforcement officials emphasized that they had not opened a judicial inquiry into the Air France case, which would have been an automatic step if there were suspicions that a wanted terrorist who had plotted an attack on the flight was on the loose.

Notwithstanding the result of this investigation, the U.S. official said the FBI and other law enforcement agencies would continue to scrutinize airline flights if there was credible intelligence they might be terrorist targets. Given the potential threat against Flight 68, the official said, the FBI and French officials “absolutely did the right thing” in canceling the flight.

Added the official: “As long as there is a threat stream out potentially targeting aviation, we will continue to look at it.”

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Times Staff Writer Sebastian Rotella in Paris contributed to this report.