LONDON - British police arrested two men aboard a diverted Pakistani airliner on Friday after Britain’s Royal Air Force scrambled Typhoon fighter jets to escort the airplane that was flying from Lahore to Manchester, in the north of England, according to defense ministry officials and the police.
The two men threatened to blow up the plane then said they were joking, a spokesman for Pakistan International Airlines said.
The Pakistan International Airlines plane, with more than 300 people on board, had been due to land there but was diverted to Stansted, just north of London, where it landed and taxied to a remote area, airport authorities in Manchester said.
Officers then boarded the plane and arrested two men, ages 30 and 41, “on suspicion of endangerment of an aircraft,” the police at Stansted said.
Shortly before the plane was to land in Manchester, the men threatened a flight attendant that “they will blow the plane up,” which was reported to the pilot, said Mashhud Tajwar, the spokesman for Pakistan International Airlines. The pilot consulted air traffic control at Manchester and was diverted to Stansted.
“Later,” Tajwar said, “the two passengers said they were joking. But the security procedure has to be followed.”
Both men are British citizens, he said.
Passenger Nauman Rizvi told Pakistan’s GEO TV that two men who had tried to move toward the cockpit during the flight were handcuffed and, after the plane landed, police arrested them. After the men were taken away, Rizvi said, the flight crew told passengers there had been a terrorist threat and that the pilot had raised an alarm.
The incident aboard the Pakistan International Airlines flight did not appear terror-related, a British security official said, though police are still investigating. But the incident further rattled the U.K. just days after two men killed a soldier on a London street in a suspected terror attack.
Initial reports from the flight indicated the two men were arguing when one of them “repeated twice or thrice that he will blow up the plane,” said Nareeta Farhan, a Pakistani Defense Ministry spokesman,
Deployment of warplanes is a standard procedure, according to defense ministry officials, when pilots using emergency codes raise the alarm. The Typhoons took off from an air base at Coningsby in Lincolnshire.
Such deployments “happen more often than we would think. It’s standard procedure in situations when, for example, contact with the pilots and the plane is lost,” said an official who spoke in return for anonymity.
The airplane - flight number PK709 - had taken off after customary security checks in Lahore and was heading to Manchester, Pakistan International Airlines said. Shortly before the plane was scheduled to land, British airport officials told the pilot to divert to Stansted, a sprawling airport in rural Essex that is officially designated as suitable for dealing with emergencies.
Mashood Tajwar, a spokesman for the airline, said 297 passengers and 11 crew members were on the plane. By late afternoon Friday, passengers had disembarked, and investigators were interviewing them, according to Mark Davison, a spokesman for Stansted Airport.
The diversion of the plane came two days after two assailants hacked to death an off-duty British soldier in broad daylight on a busy street in London, but there was no suggestion that the two episodes are linked. Police across Britain have stepped up patrols in recent days.
Earlier on Friday, a British Airways jet made an emergency landing at Heathrow Airport in London after developing engine trouble on takeoff. The plane, bound for Oslo with almost 80 people on board, landed safely and was evacuated.
Information for this article was contributed by Alan Cowell of The New York Times and by Cassandra Vinograd, Danica Kirka, Paisley Dodds and Zarar Khan of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 05/25/2013