Peninsula Daily News news sources
Authorities have alleged that Colton Harris-Moore — the so-called “Barefoot Bandit” who was arrested Sunday and extradited back to the U.S. on Tuesday — is responsible not only for hundreds of burglaries, but also the theft of several airplanes.
Harris-Moore is suspected in the theft of at least five airplanes in Washington state and elsewhere in the U.S.:
— November 2008: A plane belonging to a Seattle radio DJ is stolen from the Orcas Island Airport in San Juan County and crash-landed on the Yakama Indian Reservation.
— Sept. 11, 2009: An experimental aircraft is stolen from San Juan Island and crash-landed at the nearby Orcas Island Airport.
— Sept. 28, 2009: A plane is stolen from the Boundary County Airport in northern Idaho and crash-landed near Granite Falls in Eastern Washington.
— Feb. 10, 2010: A plane is stolen from an airport in Skagit County, flown around the restricted airspace set up for the Vancouver Olympics and landed at the Orcas Island Airport.
— July 3, 2010: A plane is stolen from the Monroe County Airport in Bloomington, Ind., and crash-landed in the Bahamas. Thirteen days later, Harris-Moore is taken into custody by Bahamian police following a high-speed boat chase.
According to a 2009 nonprofit Congressional R esearch Service think tank report, there were 429 reported airplane thefts in the U.S. between 1990 and 2006. After hitting a peak of 56 in 1991, the annual number of thefts has declined in recent years, but the average since 2004 remains nearly a dozen each year, the report says.
According to the report, some intelligence suggests that there is a “continued terrorist interest in using general-aviation aircraft to carry out attacks both domestically and overseas.”
The report cites an incident involving Zacarias Moussaoui, who was convicted of conspiracy in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Prior to his arrest, authorities said, Moussaoui had been interested in crop-dusting planes and was found to be in possession of a computer disk containing information on the aerial application of pesticides — leading the CIA to speculate that al-Qaida had “considered using aircraft to disseminate [biological warfare] agents.”
The CIA also indicated that one of Osama bin Laden’s associates had proposed a plan to attack the World Trade Center using small aircraft packed with explosives.
“This suggests that terrorists engaged in some deliberative process of weighing the pros and cons of using small general aviation aircraft … in planning the 9/11 attacks,” the report states. “While the terrorists favored commercial aircraft … heightened security measures at commercial airports could make [general-aviation] assets considerably more attractive to terrorists.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on the record and instead pointed to an online guide titled “Security Guidelines for General Aviation Airports.” The guide, published in 2004, is intended to provide general-aviation airport owners, operators and users with guidelines and recommendations for aviation security. However, it does not “contain regulatory language, nor is it intended to suggest that any recommendations or guidelines should be considered a mandatory requirement.”
