12 Held After Plane Is Escorted Back

Dutch F-16s escorted a Northwest Airlines flight bound for India back to an airport here Wednesday after the pilot radioed for help, and police arrested 12 passengers who had aroused suspicions, authorities said.

Police spokesman Rob Staenacker said he could not disclose the nationalities of those arrested or the nature of the suspicions concerning them.

While Flight 42 to Mumbai was over German airspace shortly after takeoff, the pilot radioed for permission to return to Schiphol Airport and asked for an escort of jet fighters because some of the passengers were acting suspiciously, the Defense Ministry said.

“A number of them behaved, in the opinion of the crew, in a suspicious manner,” the ministry said.

An American government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said crew members and air marshals had observed the passengers trying to use cellphones and passing the devices among themselves while the U.S. airliner was taking off.

“It was behavior that average passengers wouldn’t do,” the official said.

The DC-10, which carried 149 passengers, was escorted back to Schiphol by two F-16s scrambled from a northern Dutch military airfield, the Defense Ministry said.

The flight was canceled until today, and the passengers were put up in hotels, Northwest said.