Arrests made at NYC airports

NEW YORK -- A man who tried to use a false pilot's identification to get past security was arrested Thursday at John F. Kennedy International Airport, and at least five more were detained, police said.\nThe arrested man had tried to fly to California on Tuesday morning and was carrying a certificate from a Florida flight training school, according to a source familiar with the workings of the airline industry.\nSpeaking at a briefing about the World Trade Center disaster, Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said five or six people, some of them Arabs, had been detained Thursday afternoon or evening at the city's airports for questioning by the FBI and the Joint Terrorist Task Force.\nKerik said it was unclear whether the men detained had any connection to Tuesday's terrorist attacks.\nThe incidents caused the region's three major airports -- Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark, N.J. -- to close again just hours after service was restored.\nThe man who was arrested had been scheduled for an earlier flight on Tuesday bound for Los Angeles, but that flight was canceled after the terrorist attack began on the World Trade Center, the source said.\nThursday, he tried to board American Airlines Flight 299 bound for San Jose.\nSuspicious ticket counter staff alerted a supervisor who notified Port Authority police. Authorities tracked the man through security checks, including metal detectors, and stopped him at the gate.\nA short time later, three more men arrived at Kennedy and boarded American Airlines Flight 133 to Los Angeles, according to the industry source.\nMinutes later, law enforcement officers secretly boarded the plane using a catering cart, the source said. The officers, with weapons drawn, then removed the three from the plane.\nThe industry source was unable to account for the two suspects other people police had said were detained.\nABC News reported Thursday night that 10 people in all were detained trying to board flights at JFK and LaGuardia.\nSeparately, a law enforcement source told The Associated Press that the FBI was investigating an altercation at Kennedy on Tuesday and trying to understand whether that incident might have been an aborted hijacking attempt.\nTuesday's incident occurred about 9 a.m. -- around the same time two hijacked jet airliners crashed into the World Trade Center towers. After passengers had boarded United Airlines Flight 23, bound for Los Angeles, officials told them it had been canceled.\nThree men refused to disembark and argued with the flight crew, which called airport security. The men vanished before security arrived, the source said.