Teen Tweets Al Qaeda Terrorist Threat At American Airlines, Freaks When They Respond
When a teenage girl tweeted an Al Qaeda terrorist threat at American Airlines she apparently was only making a joke, but as she was shortly about to find out… they don’t have a sense of humor.
In a related report by The Inquisitr, when a marketing expert named Justine Sacco tweeted a joke about AIDS when on an airplane trip to Africa she angered so many people that she had lost her job by time her jet touched down on the other end.
The whole thing started when a Twitter user calling herself Sarah (which she has since changed) wrote a message to American Airlines detailing a terrorist threat:
“@AmericanAir Hello, my name is Ibrahim and I am from Afghanistan. I am part of Al Qaeda and on June 1 I am gonna do something really big bye.”
American Airlines officially responded by saying: “Sarah, we take these threats very seriously. Your IP address and details will be forwarded to security and the FBI.” Of course, that might make you wonder if this threat was even serious in the first place since the airlines should not be able to get her IP address unless Twitter itself were to officially supply that information based upon the threat.
Regardless, Sarah freaked out and responded with a series of tweets explaining that she was simply a 14-year-old girl who decided a terrorist threat would make a good prank:
“I am f*****g 14 years old. Do they think I am gonna blow up a plane or something? I am just stupid, okay…. OMG. Someone is knocking on the door. Maybe it is the FBI. OMG…. I need a lawyer. Any lawyers on here?”
She also claimed the prank was the idea of a friend:
@AmericanAir I was joking and it was my friend not me, take her IP address not mine
— demetria (@QueenDemetriax_) April 13, 2014
Sarah’s twitter followers quickly ballooned into the tens of thousands. Some Twitter users declared that she should go to jail while others simply dismissed her as being immature. Fortunately for Sarah, American Airlines decided the latter approach was best and took down their initial response:
“We took it down basically because it generated a lot of traffic. We took it down so we could better focus on our customers. At American, the safety of our passengers and crew is our number one priority. We take security matters very seriously and work with authorities on a case by case basis.”
The FBI won’t comment on investigations into potential terrorist threats, but hopefully Sarah won’t freak out too much if the men in black show up for a little chat.
