PALESTINIAN RAISES SUSPICIONS ON AIRPLANE

Man's vacation takes a detour (St. Petersburg Times)
A Palestinian raises suspicion on an arriving plane. Police are called. He is jailed on a separate warrant.

TAMPA - Maybe it was his desire to stand and stretch in the airplane. Maybe it was the gruesome images of torture he watched on his laptop that caught attention. Something about Iyad Abuhajjaj's behavior on a Southwest Airlines flight from Phoenix to Tampa on Wednesday afternoon concerned airline officials enough to call police.

Police have not accused Abuhajjaj, 36, of any wrongdoing on the plane, but a search of his name revealed an Okaloosa County warrant for his arrest.

On Thursday, the Palestinian health care worker and actor who lives in California was held without bail in the Hillsborough County jail. Deputies say Abuhajjaj met a Florida woman online in 2002, threatened her and used her AOL account without permission.

In a jail interview, he told a reporter he suspected he was singled out on the plane because of his thick accent, dark hair and olive skin. "I felt like it was because of my ethnic background," he said. "The accent, that's probably it. It could be my look, my accent, I can't say for sure." ....

In the plane, he flipped open his laptop to watch scenes from a movie he's filming with Stanford University students. Called The Strange Case of Salman abd al Haqq, the film deals with the arrest and interrogation of terrorism suspects. Abuhajjaj plays an Egyptian secret service officer, said Jeff Orolowski, the film's co-director and a Stanford senior. Some scenes show violent and bloody torture of prisoners, Orolowski said. Characters speak in English and Arabic. Abuhajjaj wondered if passengers or crew members saw the footage. "Maybe somebody saw the scenes and thought it was real," he said.

Then, he got up to use the restroom and started to stretch. A flight attendant asked him to sit down, while another passenger continued to stand up, he said. Frustrated, Abuhajjaj asked the flight attendants for names of their supervisors.

When he got off the plane, he was detained by airport police, who questioned him. A police report says only that he was "a suspicious person," and that "Southwest personnel advised that the passenger's behavior changed during the flight."

When a computer search showed the warrant, Abuhajjaj was taken to jail on charges stemming from accusations made against him in 2002 by a woman in Fort Walton Beach. Kimberly M. Mathis, a 29-year-old teacher at Rocky Bayou Christian School, accused him of threatening to kill her and misusing her family's Internet account.

HMMMMM... WAS IT RACISM? OR WAS IT THE FACT THAT HE WAS WATCHING A JIHADI VIDEO AND THEN GOT UP FROM HIS SEAT AND HEADED TOWARD THE FRONT OF THE PLANE? DID IT HELP THAT THERE WAS A WARRANT FOR HIS ARREST FOR THREATENING TO MURDER SOMEONE? HE'S LUCKY THE PASSENGERS DIDN'T BEAT THE LIVING HUMMUS OUT OF HIM.