(Reuters) – A Frontier Airlines flight heading to Florida was diverted to the city of Atlanta after a passenger on board the aircraft was observed in possession of a box cutter, the airline said in a statement on Saturday.
“The passenger in question was taken into custody by Atlanta law enforcement,” a Frontier spokesperson said in a statement.
No one was injured in the incident and passengers were offered a new flight on Saturday morning to Tampa, Florida.
Passenger Lillian Hoffman told NBC News that when the suspect went to the bathroom, the person sitting beside him had alerted her that the suspect had a knife and was “threatening to stab people.”
“So I went up to talk to the flight attendants in the front of the airplane,” Hoffman told NBC News.
“They ended up telling me that they were going to land the plane immediately and we were down in 20 minutes.”
The airline did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether the suspect had threatened to stab others on board the aircraft.
Nearly 3,000 people died in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, when al Qaeda hijackers wielding box cutters flew planes into the New York’s World Trade Center towers and into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. A fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania.
Box cutters are banned from U.S. commercial flights.
(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Diane Bartz in Washington; Editing by Sandra Maler)
