'Human bomb' Frenchwoman a guinea pig
2012-05-23 20:15
Paris - A French radio station said Wednesday it had interviewed a woman who forced a transatlantic flight to be diverted after saying she had a "surgically implanted device", shortly before the incident.
Radio Africa No1 named the woman, arrested on a flight from Paris to the United States on Tuesday after handing a note to a flight attendant saying she had a device inside her, as Cameroon-born Frenchwoman Lucie Eko.
The station interviewed her on Monday about her book Guinea Pig, in which she alleges that while hospitalised in a French psychiatric institution in 2001 doctors implanted "foreign bodies" inside her, including a microphone.
Her skin and other organs were replaced by prosthetic devices that are invisible to medical instruments, she said.
Doctors pulled out her nails and teeth, and attached devices inside her ears and pieces of skin to her liver and nose, she added.
Following her release, she wrote her book in which she said: "I am a guinea pig, at their mercy, relentlessly persecuted day and night and pushed to the limits of suicide."
"I think there's a group of people, doctors, who do what they did to me," Eko said.
"They used me as a guinea pig... they put things inside my body," she said, adding that she did not know why they had done so.
No luggage
She told her interviewer that she no longer trusted French healthcare and so was travelling to the US the following day, Tuesday, for medical analysis.
The radio station's website said that their in-house psychologist tried to dissuade her from travelling to the US and that Eko's mother-in-law had contacted them after the arrest to confirm it was indeed her.
The US Airways jet with 179 passengers and crew on board landed safely in Bangor, Maine, where the woman was taken into custody by the FBI before the Boeing 767 continued its journey to Charlotte, North Carolina.
The woman was travelling alone with no checked baggage and said she was visiting the United States for 10 days.
The incident laid bare US worry over shifting tactics of extremists as they seek new ways - and new technologies, including non-metallic bombs - for landing a deadly blow against an American target.
A French police source told AFP on Wednesday that the suspect, whose name has not yet been officially confirmed, was unknown to police and appeared to be psychologically disturbed.
