Northwest 253 passengers recall chaos during terror attempt near Detroit
The Washington Post
DETROIT — Passengers on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 knew something was very wrong when they saw flight attendants running for fire extinguishers.
Then they smelled the smoke.
“People were just running and they were scared,” passenger Veena Saigal said. “They were running towards the center of the plane, running to get away from the flames.” In a minute or so — “It seemed like a long time,” she said — the fire was out.
Saigal was sitting in row 13, six rows in front of a Nigerian man authorities believe ignited an incendiary device as the plane descended for a landing. She and other passengers described a chaotic scene as people on the Christmas Day flight lunged to subdue the suspect, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, as flames and smoke poured from beneath his seat.
Jasper Schuringa, an Amsterdam resident sitting on the right side of the plane, said he quickly leaped over several seats and on top of Abdulmutallab to detain him and extinguish the flames.
In an interview on CNN, Schuringa displayed bandages on his right hand as he described the scene inside plane: screaming passengers, pillows on fire and a quick-thinking crew.
“When I saw the suspect, that he was getting on fire, I freaked, of course, and without any hesitation I just jumped over all the seats,” Schuringa said. “And I jumped to the suspect. I was thinking like, he’s trying to blow up the plane. I was trying to search his body for any explosives. I took some kind of object that was already melting and smoking out of him.”
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