Have you seen this man?; UPDATED

No? Thank your lucky stars that TSA officials did in Orlando:

A Jamaican planning to board a flight at Orlando International Airport was detained and questioned by FBI agents Tuesday after they found components for pipe bombs and explosive and flammable liquids in his checked luggage.

The suspect was identified late Tuesday as Kevin Brown, 32, a Jamaican national who was scheduled to fly on Air Jamaica Flight 80 to Montego Bay at 2:55 p.m. Transportation Security Administration officers spotted him acting suspiciously about noon, TSA and law-enforcement officials said. Several officials said the man was "acting strange" and questioned his mental stability.

Brown was charged with attempting to carry an explosive or incendiary device on an aircraft and booked into the Seminole County Jail late Tuesday. He will appear before a federal judge in Orlando today.

Wearing blue jeans and a white shirt, Brown was searched by a bomb technician on a curb outside the airport terminal. His camouflage-style backpack also was seized and searched by an Orlando Fire Department bomb squad.

TSA searched his luggage and found "suspicious items," according to TSA officials. Among the items seized were two galvanized pipes, end caps, two small containers of BB pellets, batteries, two containers of liquids, a laptop computer and bomb-making literature, according to an FBI statement released Tuesday night. ...

Brown was detected by a TSA "behavioral specialist" trained since 2006 in spotting involuntary actions by people being deceptive, Kair said.

No one knows what he was doing with those items in his backpack, and though TSA officials stated that no one that would have been on the plane would have been in any danger, there's always that risk. Remember Richard Reid? What if Brown had gotten out of his seat, with his backpack, and headed to the bathroom with the intent of assembling and detonating a bomb on the flight?


Good work on the TSA's part, and it comes after a breach in security in 2006 caused a $5 million upgrade in security. In that incident, two airline employees used their security privilege to smuggle 13 handguns, a rifle, and 8 pounds of marijuana on a flight.


For the longest time civil liberties kooks have been screaming in protest over using any sort of profiling methods to "weed out" potentially dangerous or deceptive individuals from airlines. In this case, it worked. He was acting highly suspicious, and the feds caught him with the goods. Buy that "behavioral specialist" a round for their expert eye.


Publius II


UPDATE: From FOX:


A Jamaican man accused of trying to bring pipe bomb-making materials onto an airplane told the FBI he wanted to show friends in his home country how to build explosives like he saw in Iraq, according to documents released Wednesday.


The FBI was still trying to determine whether Kevin Brown was ever in Iraq and noted he first told officials he wanted to detonate the materials on a tree stump in Jamaica. He did not speak at a brief court hearing where he was ordered held without bail while prosecutors reviewed his mental health records.

Anybody else buy this excuse? Yeah, neither do we.

Publius II