A United Airlines flight from Newark, N.J., to Geneva was diverted to Boston Tuesday night when a flight attendant discovered a camera in a seat back pocket and could not locate the camera's owner, law enforcement officials and an airline spokesperson said.
United Airlines later identified the owner of the camera as it belonged to someone who flew on an earlier flight.
Flight 956 took off from Newark at 6 p.m., with 157 passengers and eleven crew members aboard, according to officials and United's website. The plane was escorted to Boston's Logan International Airport by two F-15's at 9:00 p.m. and landed approximately 15 minutes later "as a prudent precaution," according to NORAD. A few hours later, after being met on the ground by the FBI and other law enforcement officials, the plane was back on its way to Switzerland.
But during the flight into Logan, there was another moment of concern -- one of the fighter escorts lost its avionics, issued an emergency, but NORAD said it was able to land safely at its home base.
Cameras are an object of concern for counter terrorism authorities. In one of the post 9-11 airline terror plots, terrorists explored using camera bodies either as devices or as part of the mechanism for triggering a bomb.
More recently, ABC News has reported, al Qaeda bombmaker Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who is believed to be behind both underwear bomb plots, was working on new explosives that they hoped would pass an airport security screening. One of those designed reportedly utilized a camera.
ABC News' Luis Martinez contributed to this report.
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