Eyewitness: Terror Suspect had Accomplice in Amsterdam

“I’m very upset with the FBI right now,” Michigan attorney Kurt Haskell told me this morning in a telephone interview. “And with the Dutch military police.”

Haskell and his wife, both lawyers, were on Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day—returning from a safari in Uganda. The FBI has interviewed Haskell twice since, once at the airport and again yesterday at his Michigan law office. Agents showed him a series of head shots and asked if he could identify certain individuals.

And yet neither the FBI nor the Dutch military police will publicly corroborate what Haskell says can easily be verified by CCTV footage from the airport in Schiphol: that Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had an accomplice, or a collaborator, who helped him board the Detroit-bound flight in Amsterdam.

“At the airport in Schiphol, waiting for the flight to depart...I was 10 feet away from the ticket counter sitting on the floor,” Haskell explains. “It was a small area walled in by glass. It was very quiet in there, and I am very clear about what I heard and what I saw. Two men approached the ticket agent—one I would describe as a poor, black teenager who later turned out to be the man who tried to blow up our flight. With him was a man...my first impression was that he was wealthy and Indian...He was wearing an expensive suit. I think it was tan. He was about six feet tall and 230 to 240 pounds. The man said to the ticket agent [about Abdulmutallab], ‘He’s from Sudan. He doesn’t have his passport—we do this all the time.’ The ticket agent pointed them down the hallway and said they needed to speak with a manager...I didn’t think enough of it at the time to even mention it to my wife, but I am very clear about what I saw and heard.”

After living through a failed bombing of an aircraft, Haskell says he feels incredibly lucky to be alive, but he remains confused as to why the detail of the possible accomplice is not being acknowledged by the FBI. He also wonders why it took the FBI until today to admit that a second man had been handcuffed and detained coming off the flight after a bomb-sniffing dog smelled explosives in his bag.

Haskell and I discussed the possibility that the well-dressed man helping Abdulmutallab could have been a good Samaritan who was unwittingly helping a terrorist board an airplane. Even if that were true, he believes the FBI should acknowledge that his eyewitness account is being investigated. He says this is why “the CCTV video footage from the [Schiphol] airport should be released. You’ll be able to see me sitting on the floor, the bomber and the man helping him.”

Haskell says he is certain that the well-dressed man was not a passenger on Northwest Flight 253. After the flight landed, he, his wife and all of the other passengers were detained in Detroit for “nearly six hours.” During that time, Haskell says, he looked over every passenger hoping to identify the possible accomplice. “There was nobody even close to [looking like] him. There is no doubt in my mind that he wasn’t on the flight.”

If Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had an accomplice in Schiphol—possibly someone from the Indian subcontinent—the plot widens, and the FBI has a lot more explaining to do.

Calls to both the FBI’s Detroit field office and FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., were not returned.