Los Angeles International Airport briefly increases security after incident aboard Denver plane

April 8th, 2010 - 3:16 pm ICT by BNO News  

LOS ANGELES (BNO NEWS) — Security was briefly tightened at Los Angeles International Airport after a Qatari diplomat caused a terrorism scare aboard a flight from Washington to Denver on Wednesday evening.

A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Airport Police said the department decided to increase their visibility with uniformed officers after it received ‘unconfirmed reports’ of an incident aboard United Air Lines flight 663. “Whenever we receive unconfirmed information like that, we have to respond,” the spokeswoman said.

Security was beefed up from 8 p.m. local time until 9.30 p.m. local time, when they received official information which indicated the event on flight 663 was not a serious security incident.

It was the first such measure at Los Angeles International Airport since Christmas Day when a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist, 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmatallab, tried to detonate explosives aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

Los Angeles Airport Police immediately increases security whenever they receive unconfirmed reports of serious security incidents aboard airplanes in the United States, mostly to reassure the public of safety. The measure was introduced after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in which four commercial passenger jets were hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists. The planes later crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in a rural area near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people were killed, while more than 6,000 others were injured.

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