Metro

A shocking no-fly blunder

He should have been busted the minute he checked in for his flight at Kennedy Airport.

But Emirates Airlines workers at the check-in counter failed to check Faisal Shahzad’s name against the most recent additions to the federal no-fly list — and he wasn’t nabbed until his plane nearly took off.

The incredible lapse occurred despite the fact that all airlines had earlier received a special alert asking them to check their passenger lists by hand for Shahzad’s name, Newsweek reported.

By noon Monday, Shahzad was already on the no-fly list for his suspected role in the failed Times Square bomb plot. People on that roster are never supposed to be allowed to board a plane — even with extra screening.

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But Shahzad managed to get on a Dubai-bound plane some 11 hours later because of Emirates’ snafu.

US authorities eventually nabbed him only after the retractable bridge between the jet and the gate had been rolled back.

The near-disaster started Monday afternoon after Shahzad managed to evade FBI agents who had been keeping him under surveillance at his Bridgeport, Conn., home.

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Apparently spooked that they would soon close in on him, he slipped off and began making arrangements to get out of the country while driving to Kennedy.

Using his cellphone, he reserved his ticket for Emirates Flight 202 leaving JFK at 11 p.m., sources said.

He had started to make his reservation online — but then thought the feds were tracking him through his computer, one source told The Post.

After arriving at the airport, Shahzad, 30, checked in at the Emirates counter — shelling out cash for the ticket, but never attracting the scrutiny of airline employees.

That’s because it takes up to 12 hours for new additions to the list to automatically pop up in airlines’ systems. And the workers — despite the unusual special warning — didn’t manually check a classified Web site, as they were supposed to, to see if any names had been added.

Shahzad sauntered up to the boarding gate and had his pass scanned by airline workers.

Those employees wouldn’t have realized anything was wrong because there is no system in place to notify them.

Once all of the passengers — including Shahzad — boarded the plane, the airline then sent a complete list of the passengers’ names to the federal Transportation Security Administration, as required. That’s when the feds learned their No. 1 suspect in Saturday’s near-bombing was about to slip through their fingers.

Customs agents and other officials rushed to the plane and pulled Shahzad off.

The flight was then allowed to leave the gate and taxi down the runway. Then, jittery authorities realized there might have been two more suspicious men aboard the flight and pulled it back.

Those two men were later cleared.

Passenger Samir al Ammari, a Saudi businessman, gave a different account, saying all three men were taken off at the same time.

“No one said why, but I saw a young man, another young man and one older man being led away,” he said. “We were then told we had to go back for screening.”

Mayor Bloomberg said, “Clearly, [Shahzad] was on the plane and shouldn’t have been, and we got very lucky that he didn’t [escape].”

How terror suspect almost got away

■ Between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.: Feds place Faisal Shahzad on the FBI’s no-fly list.

■ Between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m.: Shahzad boards Emirates Flight 202 — scheduled to depart at 11 p.m. The cabin door is closed, but the airliner does not leave the gate.

â–  11:02 p.m.: Customs and Border Protection personnel open the cabin door and escort Shahzad off the plane. It then heads to the runway.

â–  11:20 p.m.: Customs Border Protection orders Emirates 202 back to gate.

â–  11:44 p.m.: Emirates 202 returns to the gate, where two other passengers are removed and the plane is searched.

Additional reporting by Chuck Bennett