The strange case of the air marshal who was stabbed by a needle during the Ebola outbreak
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Version 0 of 1. The terminal at Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, Nigeria, was packed. Inside, a small team of U.S. air marshals wormed its way through the crowd. They had a plane to catch: United Flight 143 to Houston. It was Sunday, Sept. 7, and that was the day’s mission. The exact size of this group of air marshals is an operational secret. Even how many people are employed by the federal air marshal service is not shared. But the number has certainly grown since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, renewed fear of hijacked planes. The air marshals in Lagos were following an expediter – a Nigerian airport worker charged with guiding them through the terminal and helping them get through security, said Jon Adler, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association. But the air marshals were having trouble keeping up. They kept losing sight of the expediter. He was moving too fast. The air marshals were walking through the airport, nearly to the security checkpoint, other travelers passing them in every direction, jostling for space, when two men approached from the opposite direction. These two men didn’t stand out, until they brushed past the U.S. agents. It happened in a flash, Adler said. One of the men jabbed a hypodermic needle into the arm of an air marshal and then melted into the crowd, he said. No shouting. No fighting. It took a moment to even realize what had occurred. By then, the two passing men had disappeared. “The FAM,” said Adler, using familiar shorthand for federal air marshal, “responded like anyone would. He took [the needle] out and applied pressure.” The air marshal didn’t panic. The syringe was secured, and the team of air marshals continued through security toward the airport gates. They called the U.S. Embassy, which sent someone to the airport with a dose of medication to prevent HIV infection. Then, the air marshals boarded their flight to Houston. And they were gone. “You’re in the middle of a foreign country. There’s no 911 or U.S. support coming to your rescue,” Adler said. There was no reason to stick around. And from here, the strange story takes on even odder proportions. What was in the syringe? What had the air marshal been injected with? Why? And what if it was Ebola? In September, Nigeria was in the middle of a small Ebola outbreak – 19 people in Nigeria were infected with the deadly pathogen by a man who had taken a flight from Liberia in late July. A much worse Ebola outbreak raged nearby in three West African nations. The U.S. government has worried about Ebola terrorism for years. In 2001, after a series of anthrax attacks in the United States, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases expanded its research interests to include bio-defense threats. The agency created a list of pathogens with high mortality in need of medical countermeasures. These “category A priority pathogens” included anthrax, plague, smallpox and Ebola. Millions of dollars in funding supported the research – research that is now helping to fight the Ebola outbreak. In 2006, then-U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff ruled that Ebola “presents a material threat against the United States population sufficient to affect national security.” In late October, Francisco Martinez, Spain’s state security secretary, told lawmakers there that investigators had found examples of ISIS discussing how to deploy toxins such as Ebola to infect people in terrorist attacks. U.S. officials said they had seen no signs that this was true. Now, the world’s first Ebola epidemic was playing out in West Africa. If terrorists wanted to somehow capture and bottle the rare infection, this was their best chance. And then the air marshal was punctured by a needle. When the United flight landed at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, the stabbed air marshal was quietly taken to the hospital. He was tested. No signs of any health problems, Adler said. The syringe was tested. There were no signs of any toxins or pathogens. No Ebola. No HIV. Not even the flu. The agent was placed on light duty for three weeks, Adler said, and then he returned to work. “So far he hasn’t shown any symptoms of any Ebola exposure or some other fatal virus,” Adler said. The incident flared up in the news media for a couple of days. And then the stories stopped. A spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration recently declined to discuss the case, referring questions to the FBI, which was tasked with finding out what happened at the airport in Lagos. An FBI official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the case remains open but that they have nothing to work with. The FBI’s New York City office has jurisdiction for cases in Africa. “The bottom line is there are no viable leads,” the FBI official said. But Nigerian airport officials cast doubt on the incident, saying they’ve “been drawn into a story making the rounds.” Yakubu Dati, a spokesman for the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, told The Washington Post that airport officials played security camera footage for a U.S. Embassy team showing the movements of the air marshals inside the Lagos terminal. The footage didn’t show any signs of the air marshal being stabbed by a needle, Dati said. Dati said Nigerian airport security didn’t learn of the incident until after the air marshals had left the country. Adler dismissed the suggestion that the incident was faked, calling it “unbelievable.” “We have very little confidence in their technical capabilities and they have been uncooperative prior to this incident,” he said. Adler said air marshals previously have had trouble coordinating airport security operations with Nigerian officials. So it remains unclear what happened at the airport in Lagos. If the needle didn’t contain anything dangerous, maybe it was a dry run for a real terrorist attack involving Ebola. While the epidemic rages on, fear about Ebola terrorism seem to have fallen to the side. For now. When The Post called Adler last week to talk about the September incident, he said he appreciated the reminder to bring up the topic when he meets with the head of the TSA. He said it had been a while since he had thought about the case. |