‘ISIS link’ in airline sabotage

Evidence vs. Fla. worker

An American Airlines mechanic who disabled a key navigation system on a jetliner about to take off from Miami — saying he did it over a labor dispute — had ISIS propaganda videos on his cellphone, federal prosecutors said in court on Wednesday.

When investigators grilled the mechanic, Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani, after his Sept. 5 arrest, he told them he had an “evil side” and that he “wanted to do something to delay” the plane, which had 150 people on board, said prosecutor Maria Medetis.

A co-worker told investigators that Alani had once said that his brother was a member of ISIS and that he traveled to Iraq in March to visit him.

Prosecutors said authorities also discovered a November 2018 article that had been sent to Alani about one of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashes and the issues with the plane’s navigation system.

“What you did was, at minimum, highly reckless. It was unconscionable,” federal Magistrate Judge Chris McAliley told Alani in Miami federal court Wednesday.

Authorities also said at least one of the ISIS videos was downloaded on Alani’s phone and sent to another person with a message that called for Allah to “use all your might and power against the

kafir,” or nonbelievers of Islam. A native Iraqi who is now an American citizen, Alani, 60 was not charged with a terror-related crime. He was denied bond during the proceeding, at which the feds said photos on his phone from a trip to Baghdad and Mosul showed him smiling and posing with relatives.

He was charged with “willfully damaging, destroying or disabling an aircraft.” His arraignment is Friday, and he faces up to 20 years in prison on the sabotage charge.

A criminal complaint said Alani admitted to sabotaging the Boeing 737 on July 17 as it was scheduled to fly from Miami to Nassau, Bahamas. He initially said that he did it because labor negotiations were hurting his chances to collect overtime.

He was accused of gluing Styrofoam inside a tube leading from outside the plane to its air-data module, which reports the speed, pitch and other critical data.

If the plane had taken off, the pilots would have had to fly manually because the system would not have received computer data.

The sabotage was discovered when another mechanic inspected the plane and found a loosely connected tube in front of the nose gear that had been deliberately obstructed.