On 9/9/09, AeroMexico flight 576, coming from Bolivia, was hijacked shortly after takeoff from the resort town of Cancun and flown to Mexico City. It was here where negotiations resulted in the release of approximately 112 passengers and crew members, to include Mexican, French and U.S. citizens. Authorities initially took a number of men off the flight as potential hijackers, although in the end only one man was held. The lone hijacker was alleged armed with a fake bomb (in reality a can of juice with some lights attached) and was not at all like the 19 who hijacked four U.S. airlines on 9/11 and caused 3,000 deaths.

Jose Flores, age 44, was apparently not a terrorist who wanted to die for a cause, but instead was a emotionally challenged man seeking to warn Mexican President Felipe Calderon of an alleged impending earthquake. Flores felt this date, 9/9/09, was the number for Satan (666) turned upside down. The confusion concerning the number of hijackers seems to find its origin in Flores' statement that he and three others were hijacking the plane. He would later tell authorities that his companions and co-conspirators were "the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost."

The hijacker, said to be a religious priest, demanded the plane circle Mexico City seven times before it landed. This is reminiscent of the biblical city of Jericho that Joshua and the Israelites, upon God's command and after crossing the Jordan River, circled once a day for six days. On the seventh day they circled the city seven times and then, with a great shout, the walls of the city fell. Seven is also the most used number in the Christian Bible. It can be found 394 times in the Old Testament and 87 times in the New Testament for a total of 481 references.

Flores, who said he received his earthquake revelation from God, is believed to be a drug addict and convicted armed robber from Bolivia who has lived in Mexico for almost two decades.

This situation is not without precedent, though, as many kidnappers and hostage takers, some as emotionally unbalanced at Flores, have demanded to speak to the head of a particular agency or country in the past. In 1977 Cory Moore, a 25-year-old former U.S. Marine, walked into the Warrenville Heights, Ohio, City Hall, where he fired a handgun and took an 18-year-old woman and a 48-year-old police captain hostage. He demanded that all white people leave the earth and that President Carter apologize for the misdeeds done by whites against blacks since 1619. President Carter indicated his willingness to talk to Moore, and upon the release of the police captain, the female hostage having been released earlier, President Carter spoke to Moore by telephone. While some commended Carter, others thought he had set a very bad precedent.

Enter the D.B. Cooper era

While we have seen many political hijackings over the years, it was the November 24, 1971, hijacking of then Northwest Orient flight 305, scheduled to fly from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington, that brought America into the world of airport metal detectors and body searches of passengers. A man on the flight listed as Dan Cooper, later misidentified as “D.B. Cooper,” gave a flight attendant a note indicating he had a bomb and was hijacking the airliner. Cooper also demanded $200,000 cash and four parachutes (two mains and two reserves) to be delivered to the plane upon landing at Seattle. The pilot of the plane got a quick look inside of Cooper’s briefcase, but one sufficiently long enough for him to see red cylinders, wires, and a large battery. He was convinced Cooper was serious and so were airline officials and the FBI; convinced enough to meet all of Cooper’s demands. Landing at Seattle, the plane was refueled, Cooper was given the money in marked bills as well as the four parachutes. He then demanded the plane take off and fly to Mexico City. Shortly after taking off Cooper went to the back of the Boeing 727, lowered the airstair and jumped from the plane, probably somewhere over Ariel, Washington, never to be seen again.

In February, 1980, an 8-year-old boy found almost $6,000 of the marked money along the Columbia River just northwest of Vancouver, Washington. This find reinforced the FBI’s belief that Cooper did not survive his jump into the vast forest, but "D. B. Cooper" remains “the rock star” of non violent hijackings to this day.

Fatal Airline Hijackings

There have been nine fatal U.S. airline hijackings since 1970, to include the four planes taken on 9/11. It was the result of the actions of the 19 hijackers on 9/11, though, that forced us to enter the modern day passenger screening process that all of us must endure before we get to our cramped seat and wait to pay big bucks for a Coke and a cold sandwich. While we have fortified the door leading into the cockpit to prevent a hijacker from forcing his way in, and have screened out nail clippers, bottled water and senior citizens with artificial legs, if you are aboard one of the 5,000 flights over the U.S. at any given time you still face the ever present threat of being hijacked as you fly from one city to the next. We have, of course, added armed sky marshals, most of which could be identified shortly after 9/11 because their military shoes and haircuts gave them away. We now encourage rather than discourage passengers to work together to attack their hijackers, much in the way that the passengers aboard United flight 757 did on 9/11 when they stopped their hijackers from flying their plane, (a telephone operator heard passenger Todd Beamer say: “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll!”), into yet another high value ground target, probably the Pentagon or the White House.

The hijackers we are most concerned with today are not those who want to make a brief political statement or even those, like Flores, who are simply mentally imbalanced. No, we try very hard to prevent Osama Ben laden’s henchmen from waltzing back onto another airliner and repeating the horrific events on 9/11. The most recent hijacking in the Americas, though, occurred on April 19, when a man with a handgun tried to commandeer a Canadian jetliner from Jamaica. The standoff ended before takeoff at Montego Bay's airport when military commandos rushed onto the plane and disarmed the man, who was described as "mentally challenged."

While we have FBI and police hostage negotiators and SWAT/Hostage Rescue Teams that train for such scenarios, most know that a dedicated terrorist who wants to die will be hard to dissuade. The good news, though, is that someone with a mental delusion and/or someone who wants to make a political statement can usually be dealt with in a manner that secures both the safe release of hostages and hostage takers.

Reality Hijackings

The level of our concern in such matters, however, can be seen in a new TV reality show entitled “Surviving Disaster.” A recent episode depicted an airline hijacking where the hijackers are armed with plastic knives (to defeat the metal detectors) and use their weapons to stab passengers and members of the flight crew, forcing the passengers to attack and overwhelm the hijackers. A passenger then took control of the plane and landed it with the help of those on the ground. A scary situation for any number of reasons, notwithstanding the advice the host, a former U.S. Navy SEAL gives: “When you’re in a knife fight, the person that bleeds the least wins.”

In the case of the AeroMexico flight, apparently no one had to bleed to resolve the situation, but most know we are but a plastic knife away from facing such a situation again in the skies over America. The reality of this is similar to that stated by President Abraham Lincoln when he discussed assassinations prior to his own death in 1865. Lincoln observed that if someone wanted to kill him bad enough, he probably could. For us, if someone wants to take an airliner in flight bad enough; he, like John Wilkes Booth, probably can…

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<P>The search has grown grim as FBI Agents and Connecticut State Police officers clothed in hazmat suits continue their search of a local trash dump just south of Hartford, Conn and Yale University, this as they press their investigation concerning missing 24-year-old Yale University graduate student Annie Marie Le. Sunday was to have been Le’s wedding day, but her family had already cancelled the service and caterers when she failed to turn up after first being reported missing this past Tuesday evening.</P> <P>Most now know that the double MD/PhD major had walked across the Yale campus from her office and entered a University lab building at 10 AM last Tuesday morning. Her university ID card had been used to enter the five-story building and a picture from one of the 70+ surveillance cameras around the building confirmed that she had entered the building. While apparently alone, she was carrying a number of items, not to include her purse or cel phone which she left in her office. The FBI and local and state investigators have interviewed many of the students, faculty and staff members who were in the laboratory building that morning, some of whom evidently had seen Le.</P> <P>At 12:40 PM a fire alarm was automatically activated in the building when steam set off a sensor, thereby causing an evacuation of the building. Many people who exited the lab were wearing white lab coats similar to a coat available to Le when she conducted experiments in the same building. An exhaustive review of the tape from all of the surveillance cameras around the building has yet to provide a picture of Le exiting the building. Investigators, therefore, must conclude that she somehow left without an image of her being captured on film, perhaps shielded from the eyes of a camera by the many other similarly clothed students and faculty members. Or she may have exited via the garage entrance, the one that led to parking spaces for 1,000 vehicles, or maybe something much more frightening and sinister happened and perhaps she was still in the building, the victim of some terrible assault.</P> <P>Investigators have by now thoroughly searched the 120,000 square foot laboratory building for Le. While they have denied some media reports that they had found a body, they did acknowledge finding items of potential evidence in the missing person case. Police sources indicated that the evidentiary items were thought to be items of Le’s clothing with blood on them, clothing found hidden above a drop down ceiling in the lab. It is now reported that although clothes with a small amount of blood were found, the clothing was not that known to have been worn by Le the day she disappeared, i.e., a brown skirt, a green t-shirt, and brown shoes. This evidence is undergoing analysis to see if it can be forensically linked to Le, i.e., can blood or other DNA evidence, or hairs or fibers found on the clothing be identified as having come from Le or even from a potential assailant? Unlike CSI programs on TV, such analysis can take more than a few minutes, although FBI standard operating procedure would have already established a known standard for Le’s DNA, and samples of her hair and a chart of her dental records and other identifying information would be available for comparison purposes.</P> <P>While investigators have already used tracking dogs, to include the necessary cadaver search dogs in and around the Yale laboratory building and across the campus, the dogs are now assisting investigators as they continue the grueling task of searching the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority (CRRA) waste processing facility, i.e., local land fill for evidence of Le’s presence. This search obvious sets a much more ominous tone to the hunt for the missing bride-to-be. While some had speculated, even hoped that Le had simply been overwhelmed by the stress of her studies and impending marriage, perhaps another “runaway bride,” those who knew her best refused to accept that she had given in to the pressures of the day. “She was just too much in love with her fiancée and too looking forward to her wedding day to have simply run away,” her friends and family would say. Sadly they may be correct and Le, who this year wrote an article about being safe on the Yale campus, may have become one of the victims about whom she had written.</P> <P>The search of the land fill suggests investigators consideration of the circumstances of her disappearance. By this, she was last seen in the lab building on Tuesday morning but not reported missing until Tuesday evening, and the search for her did not take on significance until Wednesday. While the trash containers in and around the laboratory were searched, evidence, even to include Le’s body in a worst case scenario, could have been transported to the land fill from somewhere on campus or such evidence could have been deposited in a similar trash container off campus. Either way all such disposal items go to one place, the local CRRA facility for processing. East coast investigators will recall that it was on Memorial Day weekend, 2002, that disgraced former U.S. Navy SEAL Benjamin Sifrit and his wife Erika befriended and then murdered a couple they had met during a night of bar hopping in Ocean City, Maryland. The Sifrits then dismembered the bodies and disposed of the remains in a local trash container. Nine days later authorities found parts of the bodies after an extensive search of a local land fill in that area and both Sifrits were subsequently convicted of the crime.</P> <P>The grim task for the FBI and the other investigators and cadaver dogs turning over the thousands of pounds trash at the waste processing plant is trying to identify and preserve potential items of evidence. Most landfill operators are able to say exactly when and where certain trash containers were collected and where the contents of such containers were dumped. Hopefully such records are correct as the search in the warm fall temperatures around New Haven continues. While some potential criminal cases require investigators to “follow the money,” in this sad case the FBI and other agencies are, as one FBI Agent said, “following the trash.” As a “green city,” New Haven also uses incinerators to burn trash in its “trash-to-energy” facility, and we just don’t know how quickly the collections from last week were handled in this manner.</P> <P>Should Le prove to have been the victim of a violent personal attack, one that may have taken her life, theories include the potential that she was stalked, or just a random victim of violence by someone prowling the laboratory halls, or she could have witnessed a crime, like a robbery or burglary where the criminal attacked her to prevent her from identifying him. Investigators must also consider that Le’s potential assailant could have hidden his or her own clothing above the false ceiling, slipped on an available white lab coat and left the building with the other occupants who walked out at the time of the fire alarm.</P> <P>Based upon the current investigation it appears that investigators are now strongly considering the likelihood that Le was the victim of some type of violent crime and the search for a missing bride-to-be may have evolved into a grim body recovery task. And for the local Yale University community; they must now consider the distinct possibility that in the worst case, a woman that had so much to offer the world may now be dead, and an unidentified killer may be walking on campus.</P> <P>To obtain a copy of our free DVD, "Protecting Children from Predators, please see <STRONG>www.Live Secure.org</STRONG> for quality proven personal and family safety related items that could help to save a life,</P>