Tuesday, January 25, 2005

More on the Chinese ‘Terror’ Plot

A plane, four Chinese, a Mexican pilot, and a suspected caller in custody.

Not bad.

It’s now being reported that officials of the Dept. of Homeland Security forced a Cessna to land in San Antonio:

Department of Homeland Security officials forced a small plane carrying four apparently illegal Chinese immigrants and a pilot identified as a Mexican national to land at an airport in San Antonio Monday night, officials said today. The immigrants were being held at Stinson Airfield shortly after federal agents forced their plane down.

Authorities are trying to determine if the four pasengers on board the Cessna 172-P, two men and two women, are linked to a report that several Chinese nationals were attempting to set off a ‘dirty bomb’ in the Boston area.

The plane is apparently co-owned by someone with an Islamic-sounding name:

Online records of the Federal Aviation Administration show the 20-year-old plane is co-owned by Afzal Hameed of Dover, Del. The other co-owner is listed as Alyce S. Taylor, but no address is given for her. The FAA records state that the plane’s last three-year registration was filed in 1999, and that the agency received no response in 2002 after mailing new registration forms to Hameed.

There may yet be an Islamic angle to this odd tale.

Meanwhile, the FBI has a suspect in custody who may be the caller:

Jose Ernesto Beltran Quinones, whom the FBI had identified Friday as a person sought for questioning, was taken into custody by Mexican state judicial police, said Dan Dzwilewski, chief of the FBI office in San Diego.

FBI agents attended the questioning, which was still under way last night. Interviewers were likely to focus first on the alleged radiological threat, and then on Beltran’s motivations, which may have been anger that he had not been paid for smuggling Chinese immigrants into the country, Dzwilewski said.

“The first area of concern for the FBI is to resolve any pending national security threat issues, and that issue being the statement that was made that nuclear material was being brought into the United states,” Dzwilewski said. “We’re working with Mexican authorities trying to resolve that question.”

Dzwilewski declined to say how Beltran was identified or located.

However they did it, kudos.

So what’s going on here? The plane apparently took off from Mexico, and while it’s not certain these are the same four Chinese, they superficially meet the description. Did Beltran ‘dump’ them over the border or not? If so, what were they doing back in Mexico? And to be clear - no one is flying a Cessna from Mexico to Massachusetts. Apart from the limited range, eluding detection would be impossible - amply demonstrated by the fact that they didn’t make it as far as San Antonio.

Sooner or later it will turn out that this is all about drugs. Still, there is another question - who is Afzal Hameed?

Michelle Malkin is all over that.

Posted by Matt on 01/25 at 12:09 PM
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