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Shoshana Hebshi Blames Racial Profiling for Removal From 9/11 Flight

An Ohio woman has cited racial profiling as the reason why she and two males were removed from a Frontier Airlines flight and questioned by federal law enforcement officers on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

Shoshana Hebshi was detained after the crew of Frontier flight 623 reported to authorities on the ground that two men on the Detroit-to-Denver flight, sitting next to Hebshi, were behaving suspiciously.

When police officers dressed in fatigues and armed with machine guns boarded the plane upon landing, Hebshi and the two men were handcuffed and removed from the plan, while stunned passengers watched.

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The 35-year old woman, detained for four hours, was strip-searched and interrogated by the FBI and Homeland Security officials.

Hebshi and the two men were eventually released after the FBI determined that she and the two men posed no threat.

The Ohio woman, rattled by the whole affair, insists she and the two men, whom she does not know, were victims of racial profiling.

Hebshi is half-Arabic and half-Jewish with a dark complexion. The two men who were removed from the plane were Indian, according to Hebshi.

On her blog, Hebshi describes being handcuffed and removed by a police officer from the airplane.

"He slapped metal cuffs on my wrists and pushed me off the plane. The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained," Hebshi wrote on her blog in a post titled "Some real shock and awe."

Law enforcement patted her down and took her to a holding cell, where a uniformed female officer performed a strip search, according to the Associated Press (AP).

When she asked what was going on, Hebshi said the male agent told her someone on the plane reported that she and the men on her row were "conducting suspicious activity," according to the AP.

After the search, an FBI agent asked Hebshi a series of question. The agent wanted to know had she noticed any suspicious behavior on the airplane, did she know the two men she was sitting next to and had she noticed them getting up during the flight, Hebshi notes on her blog.

Before boarding Frontier flight 623, Hebshi thought "flying on 9/11 would be easy," but after being detained and strip-searched she felt "violated and humiliated."

Hebshi said in an email to the AP Wednesday morning that she planned to speak with representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan.

She told the AP, not indicating whether she planned to take legal action, that "it seems there are some civil rights violations to consider here."

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