More on Mayo Mayhem

Catherine Mayo, 59, the self identified peacenik who was arrested for creating a ruckus on a trans Atlantic flight from London to DC had been "vacationing" in Pakistan. From James Taranto at WSJ's Opinion Journal online:


One obvious question is, what kind of person vacations in Pakistan? Was Mayo drawn there by what Lonely Planet describes as "some of Asia's most mind-blowing landscapes, extraordinary trekking, a multitude of cultures and a long tradition of hospitality"? Perhaps. But an Associated Press report suggests there was another attraction:

Mayo's son, Josh, 31, described his mother as a peace activist and said she had been in Pakistan since March. She has traveled there often since making a pen pal before Sept. 11, 2001. The pen pal hasn't been allowed to visit the United States, he said. . . .

Henry Lefebvre, a neighbor who met Mayo a couple of years ago at a picnic, said she told him she was headed to Pakistan.

"She said she had a boyfriend there," he said.

Probably her lawyer is right, and she is just a nut. But boyfriends can be dangerous. A BBC account from 1986 describes the case of Nizar Hindawi, a Syrian-backed Jordanian national who used his pregnant Irish girlfriend in an attempt to murder some 380 passengers traveling from London to Tel Aviv:

Mr Hindawi attempted to blow up the flight by planting a timer bomb inside his girlfriend's hand luggage. Ann Murphy had been under the impression that he would follow her on a later flight.

The explosives were only discovered when a security official searched the bag thinking it was too heavy. The 3lb of plastic explosives and a detonator concealed in a pocket calculator had made it through two X-ray machines undetected.

Mayo surely would have come in for extra scrutiny if Britain had an Israel-style system of airport security, in which agents ask probing personal questions in an effort to find would be terrorists.

Scary thought: There are lots of single lefty females desperate for a boyfriend, (at least where I live). Islamofascists would have a rich ore of unwitting non-Muslim terrorists to mine...