On board NWA Flight 253

Share

By the groggy ninth hour of Northwest Airlines's Christmas morning flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, babies were fussing and passengers had wearied of the plane's stale air.

The leftover scent of lunch - European cold cuts and cheese - was still wafting through the cabin of the Airbus A330, which was stuffed with nearly 300 passengers as the plane began dropping into the clouds before noon Eastern Standard Time, bearing down on Metropolitan Wayne County Airport.

While some queued up for their final washroom break, a 23-year-old named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab drew the ire of his fellow passengers by taking 20 minutes on his turn.

At the time, they wouldn't have guessed the baby-faced Nigerian was fumbling around in there with a concealed powder and liquid intended for imminent use as a bomb. Security at the airport in Amsterdam had seemed tight.

"At the gate, everyone was interviewed by a team of around 10 personal screeners," Roey Rosenblith, one of the plane's passengers, later wrote in the Huffington Post. He added that he was "frisked so thoroughly by the young Dutch security guard that I began to wonder if he was enjoying himself."

When Mr. Abdulmutallab finally emerged from the bathroom, he shuffled back to his seat 19A on a window near the centre of the plane and complained to his seatmate about a stomach ache. He covered himself with a blanket and slouched a bit. All around him, passengers were getting set for landing: fastening seatbelts and stowing their belongings. There had already been the familiar thud of the landing gear lowering; flight attendants were belting themselves in.

Then the popping began, a quick but muffled barrage that sounded like fireworks.

At the right-most end of row 19, the eyes of Jasper Schuringa were scanning for the source of the sounds when the sharp, alarming scent of something burning reached his nose. As passengers around him began screaming "Fire!" Mr. Schuringa, a Dutch filmmaker, peered down his row to the left. His eyes landed on Mr. Abdulmutallab, who was on fire.

"I freaked, of course," Mr. Schuringa said in an interview with CNN, his right hand bandaged. "Without any hesitation, I just jumped on the suspect. I was thinking he was trying to blow up the plane."

During the quick seconds it took for Mr. Schuringa to hurtle himself across the width of the jet and over the top of several passengers, Veena Saigal, a 63-year-old on the final leg of a journey from Delhi to Ann Arbor, Mich., peered backward from the 13th row through the cracks between seats.

"I thought something maybe hit the window," she recounted. "Between the seats you could see there was a fire … a little glow of fire underneath," she said.

From her seat, Ms. Saigal watched as passengers began streaming by her and moving toward the front of the plane.

"They were … getting away from the fire," she said, adding: "The air hostesses were pushing them back in their seats so they could take care of the situation."

Back in row 19, the situation was becoming more clear to Mr. Schuringa, who had clobbered Mr. Abdulmutallab in an effort to stop flames from spreading beyond the man's pants and a couple of pillows that had ignited beneath him on the floor.

"I was trying to search his body for any explosives," he said. "I took some kind of object that was melting and smoking out of him and I tried to put out the fire."

That "object" was a homemade explosive device made from liquid he carried on board in a plastic syringe and powder in a condom-like pouch, according to a Federal Bureau of Investigation affidavit. Mr. Abdulmutallab is alleged to have sewn it into his underwear to outfox metal detectors and human security screeners.

"Even if he had been thoroughly frisked, the only way the guard would have noticed anything is if he literally put his hands down the guy's pants and searched his groin," mused the passenger, Mr. Rosenblith.

Minutes after the initial pops went off, Mr. Schuringa's attempts to stifle the fire with his bare hands were failing. He wrenched the burning Mr. Abdulmutallab from his seat to allow other passengers to deal with the flames and, on his own, began to tear off the man's clothes.

"If he was wearing any more explosives it would have been very dangerous," Mr. Schuringa explained.

With water bottles and fire extinguishers, a team of flight attendants quickly worked at the flames while Mr. Schuringa and another flight attendant held Mr. Abdulmutallab. While the commotion settled in a matter of minutes, the young man stood silently and without struggle with his charred pants around his ankles.

"He was just very calm. He was shaking, but he didn't resist anything," Mr. Schuringa said. "He looked like a normal guy as well. It was hard to believe he was trying to blow up this plane."

Still, Mr. Schuringa put him in a "chest lock," pinning his arms behind his back, to walk him toward the front of the plane, Ms. Saigal recalled.

Shama Chopra, who lives in Montreal, was sitting in the fourth row of business class. When Mr. Abdulmutallab was walked by her, she recognized him as the man she had noticed acting somewhat strangely before boarding the flight.

"I was looking at this guy and his hands were on his forehead," she recounted to CTV about her encounter with him in the airport. "He was thinking very hard. I was thinking, 'Why is he standing like this?' They checked him again. He's the last one they let on the plane," she said.

Now, Mr. Abdulmutallab was in front of her again, shirtless and without pants, his legs badly burned. He did not want to sit down, she recalled, but flight attendants forced him.

"They started screaming at him … tying his hands behind his back," she said.

From the cockpit, the flight's captain came over the intercom to assure passengers they would be on the ground within minutes.

As the plane made its quick descent, Melinda Dennis, a first-row passenger, studied Mr. Abdulmutallab, who was next to her.

"The first thing that caught my eye was the severity of his wounds," she told MSNBC in an interview. "The skin [on his legs]was really gone in very large patches. It just looked as if it had been melted away."

The other thing that struck Ms. Dennis, she said, was that Mr. Abdulmutallab gave "no indication he was nervous. It was as if he was just another passenger sitting there."

Over the weekend, Mr. Abdulmutallab was charged with attempting to blow up NWA 253. He was transferred from a Michigan hospital yesterday to a secure, unidentified facility in the eastern part of the state, according to a U.S. Marshals spokesman. A court hearing aimed at obtaining his DNA is scheduled for Monday.