Housewife: Handcuffed, strip-searched, detained over ‘appearance’ on 9/11 anniversary

DETROIT — An Ohio woman said Tuesday that she endured nearly four hours in police custody that included being forced off an airplane in handcuffs, strip-searched and interrogated at Detroit’s airport on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks — all, she believes, because of her Middle Eastern appearance.

Shoshana Hebshi, 35, told The Associated Press she was one of three people removed from a Denver-to-Detroit Frontier Airlines flight after landing Sunday afternoon. Authorities say fighter jets escorted the plane after its crew reported that two people were spending a long time in bathrooms — the two men sitting next to Hebshi in row 12 whom she said she had never met.

Hebshi said she doesn’t notice how many times the men went to the bathroom. “I wasn’t keeping track,” she said.

Full Article on the Boston Herald

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Flight on 9/11 anniversary ends in handcuffs for housewife
msnbc.com

Shoshana Hebshi will never forget where she was on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11.

She and two other airline passengers were handcuffed and strip-searched after flying into Detroit on Sunday.

No charges were filed against Hebshi, a self-described “half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio,” or the two men sitting next to her, who were flying in from Denver when the crew of Frontier Airlines Flight 623 alerted authorities that they were reportedly behaving suspiciously.

In a blog post titled “Some real Shock and Awe: Racially profiled and cuffed in Detroit,” Hebshi, an American citizen, told her tale of temporary detainment, which she had begun to share with Twitter followers in real-time — until handcuffs were placed on her wrists.

Full Article on MSNBC

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Some real Shock and Awe: Racially profiled and cuffed in Detroit
Shoshana Hebshi

Silly me. I thought flying on 9/11 would be easy. I figured most people would choose not to fly that day so lines would be short, planes would be lightly filled and though security might be ratcheted up, we’d all feel safer knowing we had come a long way since that dreadful Tuesday morning 10 years ago.

But then armed officers stormed my plane, threw me in handcuffs and locked me up.

My flight from Denver landed in Detroit on time. I sent a text message to my husband to let him know we had landed and I would be home by dinner. The plane stopped on the tarmac, seemingly waiting to have the gate cleared. We waited. I played on my phone, checking Facebook, scrolling through my Twitter feed. After a while of sitting there, I decided to call my husband to tell him the plane was being delayed and I would call him when I got off the plane.

Just as I hung up the phone, the captain came over the loudspeaker and announced that the airport authorities wanted to move the airplane to a different part of the airport. Must be a blocked gate or something, I thought. But then he said: Everyone remain in your seats or there will be consequences. Sounded serious. I looked out the window and saw a squadron of police cars following the plane, lights flashing. I turned to my neighbor, who happened to be an Indian man, in wonderment. What is going on? Others on the plane were remarking at the police as well. Getting a little uneasy, I decided the best thing for me to do was to tweet about the experience. If the plane was going to blow up, at least there’d be some record on my part.

Full Article on Shoshana Hebshi’s blog

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