A 14-year-old Dutch girl who sent a terror threat to American Airlines as a Twitter “joke” has been arrested by police in Rotterdam, it has been reported.
The girl received a torrent of abusive messages on Twitter after her exchange with the airline, in which she pretended to be an al-Qa’ida-member from Afghanistan, was shared thousands of times.
American Airlines responded to her vow to “do something really big” by saying it “takes these threats very seriously” and said the issue would be passed on to the FBI.
The girl, identified only as Sarah, protested that she was just “joking” and that she was from the Netherlands, not Afghanistan. She later suspended her account.
According to local media reports, police in the Dutch city confirmed that she has been arrested in relation to the threat.
The Netherlands-based news service BNO News reported that the 14-year-old was detained “after Rotterdam police’s own investigation”, not at the request of American Airlines or the FBI.
It is not entirely clear what Sarah was hoping to achieve with the message yesterday, but she presumably could not have been expecting the reply she then received.
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