BRITAIN: Europe's biggest airline, British Airways, cancelled a London-Washington flight yesterday as fears of a September 11th-style attack grounded a US-bound plane for the seventh time in just over a week.
A flight from Heathrow to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, today has also been cancelled.
Washington has introduced dramatic security measures this week, ordering international airlines to put armed marshals on certain flights and dispatching US fighter jets to tail some incoming planes.
BA did not give detailed reasons for suspending Flight 223, which was also grounded on Thursday. "It has been cancelled. That was based on advice from the UK government for a security reason," a BA spokeswoman said.
The same flight was held at Washington's Dulles International Airport on New Year's Eve after fighter jets were sent to escort it in. Passengers were questioned, but no one was arrested.
Mr Philip Baum, editor of Aviation Security International, said he suspected BA suspended the flights because of intelligence rather than concerns about names on passenger lists.
Britain said on Sunday it would put armed sky marshals on some flights. But British pilots say they are strongly against guns on planes.
"There is not enough being done about ground security," a British Airline Pilots Association spokesman said yesterday.
Two AeroMexico flights from Mexico City to Los Angeles over New Year and three Air France flights to Los Angeles over Christmas were also cancelled.
But a newspaper report said yesterday the Air France planes were grounded because the FBI had confused the names of several passengers with suspected terrorists.
The FBI gave French police a list of six suspects and information indicating militants linked to al-Qaeda were planning to hijack an Air France jet, according to the Wall Street Journal Europe.
Meanwhile, a passenger carrying two knives and talking about the end of the world on a Luton-bound flight was arrested by Spanish police, officials said yesterday.
The Chilean man was detained after he started acting suspiciously as the easyJet plane taxied for take-off at Madrid's Barajas airport on Thursday night.
Police later found two three-inch penknives on the man which had not shown up on the metal detector machine for boarding passengers. -(Reuters)