Does terrorism profiling work?
I wonder if the name Anne-Marie Murphy means anything to you. Probably not, because it's nearly 24 years since she was in the headlines.
In April 1986, she was about to board a plane from London to Tel Aviv, to meet - so she thought - the parents of her Palestinian fiancé, a man called Nizar Hindawi. She was 32 years old, and pregnant.
She was also, unknowingly, carrying a bomb in her suitcase, hidden there by Hindawi, and primed to explode when the El Al plane was somewhere over Europe. The airline security people spotted it, and she never got on the plane. (You can read the official Israeli account of the story .)
I was reminded of Anne-Marie Murphy amid all the renewed discussion following the attempted Christmas Day plane attack about whether or not airline passengers should be "profiled" - in other words, singled out for more intense screening if they fit someone's idea of what a terrorist looks like.
Back in 1986, there was no particular reason to single out pregnant Irish women as likely anti-Israel terrorists. But Israeli security have long been suspicious of single women travelling alone, and they have no hesitation in asking the most personal questions about their relationships and private life.
It may be that it makes sense to concentrate anti-terrorism measures at airports on certain categories of passengers. But the Hindawi case reminds us that it's not always easy to decide what a terrorist looks like.
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