US citizen detained at Delhi airport for questioning

A United States national was detained at the Indira Gandhi International Airport here on Wednesday morning just before he boarded a Qatar Airways flight to Doha on his way to New York after a knife was found hidden in his hand baggage.

Sources said the man, identified as Winston Marshall Carmichael, 56, was questioned by officials of the Delhi Police and the Intelligence Bureau after he was detained by the personnel of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), manning the airport, on suspicion. Nothing incriminating had been found against him so far, they said.

Apart from the knife, which the sources said was hidden inside a "shilajit", a herbal plant, what aroused the suspicions of the police was the fact that the man had recently visited Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Among other things, the police were trying to verify the places he had stayed in and the people he had met while in India.

While no details have been given out officially, some information that emerged from sources indicated that Carmichael said he was a carpenter by profession in New York and had converted to Islam some years ago.

The police and the IB officials were taking the matter seriously in view of the close resemblance the detention had to the case of David Headley, the suspected Lashkar-e-Taiba operative who was arrested in Chicago in October last year for his alleged role in planning terror attacks in India, including the 26/11 attack which claimed 166 lives.

The sources said the US Embassy in Delhi had been informed of the detention.

According to sources, the several hours of interrogation had not establish anything incriminating against Carmichael so far. He was kept at the Lampur detention centre in Outer Delhi after the questioning by the intelligence officials.

They said the X-ray screening of Carmichael's baggage showed a sharp object but, on being asked by the CISF men at the security counter, he denied any such thing. An item-by-item screening led to the discovery of the blade-like object in a packet containing the "shilajit".

The discovery of the sharp object, which some sources said was too small to be considered a weapon, and the entries in Carmichael's passport about his visits to Pakistan and Bangladesh were enough for the CISF to hand him over to the Delhi Police and the intelligence officials for detailed questioning.

NNN