'Mistaken identity' by FBI
2004-01-02 12:01
Paris - The French government cancelled six flights between Paris and Los Angeles by the national flag-carrier Air France last month after US investigators wrongly identified six passengers as potential terrorists, the French interior ministry said Friday.
A ministry spokesperson said the US Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI had based its information on passenger lists containing names similar to the names of suspected members of the international terrorist network Al-Qaeda.
"A check was carried out in each case and in each case it turned out to be negative," a ministry spokesman told reporters.
"The FBI worked with family names and some family names sound alike," the spokesman said. He noted that some of the names had been transliterated from Arabic, which uses a different alphabet from French and English.
"The difficulty is compounded when you have no first name or date of birth," he said.
The French government agreed to a US request to cancel the Christmas-period flights after 48 hours of talks with US officials. Traffic between Paris and Los Angeles was allowed to resume on December 26.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that one of the suspects named by the FBI was a child whose name happened to be the same as a wanted Islamic extremist from Tunisia.
The others on the list were an elderly Chinese lady who had at one time run a restaurant in Paris, an insurance salesman from Wales and three French nationals, the paper said.
- AFP