American Airlines 'prank' tweet goes viral

Updated
Girl Arrested After 'Joke' Terrorism Tweet To Airline
Girl Arrested After 'Joke' Terrorism Tweet To Airline



A Twitter user's joke led to her arrest. On Sunday, a user going by the name Sarah tweeted at American Airlines, "Hello my name's Ibrahim and I'm from Afghanistan. I'm part of Al Qaida and on June 1st I'm gonna do something really big bye."

It only took minutes for the airline to reply. In a tweet that has since been taken down, American Air posted, "Sarah, we take these threats very seriously. Your IP address and details will be forwarded to security and the FBI."

In an attempt to clear everything up Sarah posted a long rant, which included, "OMFG I was kidding...I'm so sorry I'm scared now...I was joking and it was my friend not me, take her IP address not mine... I'm f***ing 14 years old, do they think I'm gonna blow up a plane or something. I'm just stupid okay. And my personal favorite of her tweets, "I'm just a fangirl, pls I don't have evil thoughts and plus I'm a white girl."

Then the tweets start taking a weird turn. Sarah's messages had gone viral and she started getting tens of thousands of new followers and retweets. "Omg I got over 10k RTs for that tweet omg... I feel famous omg... Okay today was the highlight of my twitter days... Over 20k followers yay... I changed my name to Ibrahim."

But her celebrity status didn't last long, her account has since been suspended, and on Monday she was arrested in her home in the Netherlands. Dutch police told the Business Insider, "We're not in a state that we can communicate any state of charges at this point. We just thought it was necessary to bring this out mostly because of the fact that it caused a great deal of interest on the internet."

And Sarah wasn't the only person throwing around bomb threats this weekend. NFL linebacker Aldon Smith became aggressive with TSA agents at Los Angeles International Airport and threatened that he had a bomb. He was also arrested.

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