Implanted bombs seen as remote airline threat

— -- Is the next terror threat in the skies a suicide bomber with explosives surgically implanted in his body?

The prospect was enough to frighten a US Airways crew and cause a flight from Paris to Charlotte to be diverted May 22 after attendants said passenger Lucie Zeeko Marigot hinted that she had a bomb inside her body.

She didn't. And terrorism analysts say it's unlikely she could have, given the technical and practical difficulties in making an effective bomb, implanting it and detonating it.

"The chances are astronomically small," says Dr. Marc Siegel, an internist and clinical associate professor at New York University. "It's not something that people need to be worried about."

Even if terrorists found somebody willing to undergo the operation, he and other analysts say, there are other problems.

Arthur Hulnick, a former CIA intelligence officer who is now an associate professor of international relations at Boston University, says it would be difficult to implant enough explosives to down a plane and hard technically to detonate it.

And, he says, the bomber's body would absorb some of the explosion and shield the plane from damage.

"It certainly seems to be within the realm of possibility, but not within the realm of likelihood," Hulnick says.

The idea of a surgically implanted bomb has been floated on terrorist websites, analysts say. Lawmakers say the US Airways flight crew acted appropriately in taking Marigot's threat seriously and diverting the plane to Maine.

"We have seen intelligence identifying surgically implanted bombs a threat to air travel," says Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the top Republican on the Senate's homeland security committee.

TSA Administrator John Pistole told a House homeland security subcommittee last week about intelligence last year "where terrorists were talking … about not just underwear bombs, as we've seen, but actually taking explosives and having the suicide bomber agree to have that device surgically implanted."

Pistole described the threat in justifying TSA's behavior-detection officers — who watch travelers and sometimes chat with them to detect suspicious behavior — as maybe "the best layer of security" to thwart a non-metallic bomb put inside someone.

Marigot, 41, a French citizen born in Cameroon, gave a crewmember a note that said she was the "victim of a group of doctors" and that she had "an object in her body that is out of (her) control," according to U.S. Attorney Thomas Delahanty.

Two doctors on board the flight examined her and found no visible scars indicating an implant. Delahanty declined to press criminal charges and instead returned Marigot to France, after a search of the plane found no explosives and further investigation revealed the crew and passengers were never in danger.

Douglas Hagmann, director of the Northeast Intelligence Center, a think tank that monitors terrorist threats on the Internet, says talk of an implanted bomb has circulated among suspected terrorists for a decade as they have sought ways to circumvent airport security.

He says these Internet communications have floated plans for suicide bombers to feign pregnancy or breast implants in an attempt to hide explosives. But, he says, the ploy has never been attempted because the terrorists lack the technical ability to pull it off.