Belligerent passenger on Continental flight yells "Allah is Great!"; tackled by men on board

Chivalry isn't dead just yet in America.

Passengers aboard a Continental Airlines flight bound for Houston Tuesday sprang into action to help a flight attendant having trouble with an unruly passenger. Twenty minutes after the plane departed Portland, pilots returned to the city where the FBI was waiting.

Passengers said the unruly man was a problem from the beginning. After boarding Flight 1113, the man became upset because he was not seated next to his friend.

Then after the flight took off, he ignored the “No Smoking” sign and tried to light an electronic cigarette.

A flight attendant asked the passenger to turn off the cigarette, but he refused. The Middle Eastern man started screaming at the smaller woman.

“He was screaming, ‘Allah is great, Allah is great,’” said Nancy Haywood, passenger. “And it kind of worries you when that happens, but believe me, there were enough men to hold him down.”
And they did. Men on the plane jumped up and ran to assist the flight attendant.

“Every guy that was in my area was ready to go,” said Mark Foster, passenger. “It was not even a thought. You can tell buckles were off and people were already leaning toward the aisles.”

The men subdued the unruly passenger while the flight attendant ran to the back and retrieved plastic handcuffs and ankle cuffs.

“It almost made me cry to see the way everybody responded because the gentlemen that could help got up and helped the stewardess; she was just a little bitty thing,” said Jeanna Wisher. “What happened should have happened, everybody got up and did a part that needed to do it.”

UPDATE:
The man who repeatedly yelled “Allah is great” as he was removed yesterday from a plane that was forced to make an emergency landing due to his unruly behavior is a 19-year-old Saudi Arabian who was arrested Sunday night after he led Oregon police on a drunken car chase that saw him ram two cop cars and attempt to run over pedestrians, The Smoking Gun has learned.

According to investigators, Yazeed Mohammed Abunayyan was smoking an electronic cigarette on a Continental Airlines flight traveling from Portland to Houston. When a flight attendant directed Abunayyan to stop smoking (or relinquish the device), he refused and began “yelling profanities and swinging his fist at the flight attendant,” according to an indictment filed this afternoon in U.S. District Court in Portland.

Abunayyan, pictured in the mug shot at right, also hit or attempted to hit other passengers and was “speaking or singing about Usama bin Laden and his hatred of women,” the indictment charges. Abunayyan, who reportedly has been in the U.S. visiting relatives, was charged with a felony count of interfering with flight crew members.