Allah was on this from the get-go.

The “unruly passenger” was reportedly carrying Vaseline, matches, a screw driver, and a note referencing Al Qaeda.

The flight was carrying 182 passengers and 12 crew.

The flight, with 182 passengers and 12 crew members landed safely, UAL Corp. spokesman Brandon Borrman said. Borrman said a female passenger was spotted engaging in some “suspicious” activity, but he could not immediately say what the activity was.

State Police and federal agencies took control of the plane after it landed.

Passengers were seen coming off the plane on the tarmac and being loaded onto a bus. Orlandella said their carry-on luggage was being checked. The flight was from London’s Heathrow Airport to Dulles.

Update: This is weird.

One of the passengers involved in the fight was reportedly bound in the back of the plane, airport officials said. An FBI spokeswoman said the bound passenger was a female suffering from some form of claustrophobia.

According to Allah’s report, CNN had a analyst on earlier saying the “claustrophobic passenger” may have been the source of the disturbance, but that was before the news about the note referencing Al Qaeda.

Update: Fox is reporting that a TSA representative is denying reports that the woman was carrying any of the items listed above, and that it was, indeed, a claustrophobic passenger who got into a dispute with flight attendants. Could be nothing.

Update: Apparently the above denial that she was carrying banned items came from Phil Orlandella, spokesman for Boston’s Logan International Airport. That’s who Fox attributed it to, but Orlandella was also the source who originally said she had the items. Ay yay yay.

Update: Latest AP wire story takes the contraband items out of the lead.

BOSTON (AP) - Fighter jets escorted a London-to-Washington, D.C., flight to Boston’s Logan airport Wednesday after the pilot declared an emergency because of a passenger disturbance, officials said.

A federal security official said there was no indication of terrorism.

The female passenger aboard United Flight 923 said she was claustrophobic and became very upset and got into some kind of confrontation with the flight crew, said George Naccara, federal security director for the Transportation Security Administration for Massachusetts’ airport.

Authorities are interviewing passengers, and dogs are sniffing the luggage.

This report, via Allah, from the Blotter, has the same timestamp as the AP story, but carries this conflicting information:

The woman, a 47-year old U.S. citizen and a resident of Vermont wearing a college sweatshirt and acting aggressively, was searched.

She had loose matches, literature in a foreign language that had been downloaded from a computer and printed and a partially open container of petroleum jelly. She did not have a screwdriver contrary to previous media reports.

And this:

The woman had been aggressive prior to the incident and at one point threatened to urinate in a sink.

Curiouser and curiouser.

NBC says the woman is 60.

Update: I’ve got a deadline on another project, so I may not be able to follow closely for a bit, here, but Hot Air and Ace have got it in hand.

Ace:

Now comes the lecturing and hectoring about “overreactions” and “anti-Muslim backlash.”

Root causes, baby. We wouldn’t overreact if you weren’t always trying to murder us.

You must understand the non-Islamic point of view.

Which is, basically: Stop trying to kill us.

It’s already started on the news channels, with guests lecturing newscasters, but it looks like, in this instance, all of the conflicting reports came from official sources, so there wasn’t a lot of speculation going on.

We have lost the luxury of leaving terrorism out of a story like this until the full, confirmed, two-sourced, second-day story comes out. Why? Because if a claustrophobic woman is a diversionary tactic and the pilot doesn’t land the plane, the plane could come down in a much more unpleasant way.

If officials don’t treat it as a possible terrorism situation, other operations on other planes could be moving along swimmingly while we’re making sure we don’t wrongly impugn a claustrophobic woman by suggesting the possibility of terrorism.

And, if the pilot and security officials are treating it as such, ain’t nothing wrong with the press telling the public. Makes much more sense for the press to tell us how officials respond to real-time possible terrorist threats (at which point, we can critique and improve those responses) than to tell us how officials use intelligence and wire-tapping to foil such threats before they’re in the air (at which point, we can kiss goodbye any hopes of foiling them in the future).

Update 5:16pm: More of the story, from Reuters:

Nenette Day, a spokeswoman with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Boston, said the woman became disruptive on the flight and had to be forcibly restrained. She was arrested after the plane landed. Disrupting an international flight is a crime, said Day.

The woman was carrying hand cream and matches but was not a terrorist threat, said Christopher White, a Transportation Security Administration spokesman. Those items are not banned on commercial flights, he said.

“There are no known links to terrorism regarding this event at this time,” said White…

“Her carry-on bags subsequently were searched and matches were found in the bag as well as a gelatin-like substance but those items were not deemed to have any terrorist connection or pose a threat to the aircraft,” Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney told a news conference.

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