Dutch police arrest 12 passengers

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- Dutch F-16s escorted a Northwest Airlines flight bound for India back to an airport here Wednesday after the pilot radioed for help, and police arrested 12 passengers who had aroused suspicions, authorities said.\nPolice spokesman Rob Staenacker said he could not disclose their nationalities or the nature of the suspicions against them, only that "12 people have been arrested." \nAn American passenger, who identified herself only as Alpa, told AP Television News she saw about a dozen people taken off the plane in handcuffs.\nWhile Flight NO0042 was over German airspace shortly after takeoff, the pilot radioed for permission to return to Schiphol Airport and asked for an escort of jet fighters because some of the passengers were acting suspiciously, the defense ministry said.\n"A number of them behaved, in the opinion of the crew, in a suspicious manner," said the ministry. "As a result, the captain asked to return to Schiphol."\nA U.S. government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, said crew members and air marshals observed the passengers trying to use cell phones and passing them among themselves while the airliner was taking off.\n"It was behavior that average passengers wouldn't do," the official said.\nThe DC-10 was escorted back to Schiphol by two F-16s scrambled from a northern military airfield, the defense ministry said. Routine security measures were swiftly put into place.\nThe plane was carrying 149 passengers, when it turned around after crossing the German border. A Northwest DC-10 has a normal seating capacity of 273.\nThe Dutch National Terrorism Coordinator's Office was informed, but said there was no reason to raise the national threat level, spokeswoman Judith Sluiter said.\nThe flight was canceled until Thursday, and the passengers were put up in hotels, Northwest said.\n"It is the same as it was before -- light threat," said Sluiter.\nLike airports around the world, Schiphol raised the level of security two weeks ago when British police announced they had uncovered a plot to blow up several U.S.-bound commercial jetliners, but Kuypers said threat levels had returned to normal.\nSeveral alerts have been sounded since the terrorism plot was outlined in London. On Friday, a British plane made an emergency landing in southern Italy after a bomb scare, and the U.S. Air Force scrambled jets to escort a United Airlines flight from London to Washington as it was diverted to Boston.\nWednesday's security alert was the first at Amsterdam's international airport since September, when a British Airways flight returned in similar circumstances. It turned out to be a false alarm.