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Man Calls in Fake Airport Bomb Threat to Avoid Missing His Flight

News
by Eben Diskin Aug 17, 2018

When Jacob Meir Abdellak, a Frenchman living in London, was too late to board his flight from London Gatwick to Los Angeles this past May, staff would not allow him on board. His solution to avoid missing his flight was to call in a fake threat involving a “noxious substance likely to create serious risk to human health.”

About eight minutes before the flight was supposed to leave, passengers had to deplane and be rescreened. The flight was delayed by 90 minutes, but Abdellak, still late, managed to miss it.

Abdellak might have gotten away with it, if authorities hadn’t discovered that the fake call came from the same number he used when booking his ticket. When Abdellak came back to the airport on May 22nd to take another flight to the US, he was arrested. Last Tuesday, he was sentenced to 10 months in prison.

It was the “worst decision he could have made,” Gatwick Police Chief Inspector Marc Clothier told Reuters. Ridiculous, yes, but it’s not the first time this idea has crossed someone’s mind. In 2016, a man from New York called in an airport bomb threat to keep his girlfriend’s flight from leaving. If that isn’t true love — what is?

H/T: Travel & Leisure

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