A few hours after the mutilated bodies of George Karalis and George Loizos were found on a boat off the coast of Athens in 1998, the Greek authorities declared that the cousins were gay lovers who died in a murder-suicide after a row. “In my view the pilot was right not to run risks.”Australian Federal Police said the 18 air crew and a number of passengers were interviewed after the plane landed, having dumped a full load of fuel. No charges were laid, and the aircraft – with the same pilot, crew and passengers – took off again yesterday.Superintendent Peter O’Brien said police had established that the note was not left on board from a previous flight.Mr Anderson said the identity of the note’s author might never be known. “It may have been a genuine and serious misunderstanding,” he said.”Nonetheless, someone has been irresponsible at least, and horrendously selfish and stupid at worst, and every effort will be made to find the person responsible.”. Australian authorities treated the incident as a full-scale emergency, with airports along the eastern seaboard placed on alert. The 747 was met by police and emergency vehicles, and Sydney’s international airport was closed for several hours.But, yesterday, flight attendants said they commonly used the letters for “best on board”, indicating the best-looking male or female passenger. “Someone sitting in a particular seat, to put it quite bluntly, looks good,” Michael Mijatov, an official of the Flight Attendants Association of Australia, said.Others noted that the letters might simply refer to a man’s name.

But the Transport Minister, John Anderson, defended the pilot’s decision to return to Sydney, with 246 passengers, including a senior US diplomat, on board.”He would have carefully assessed the risk and he made the decision in the light of the information available to him,” Mr Anderson said. The “bomb threat” that prompted a United Airlines plane bound for Los Angeles to turn around and return to Sydney was the letters “B-O-B” on a sick bag in a lavatory. Each truck will take more than three weeks to reach Darfur from the Port of Sudan.The fighting has claimed 30,000 lives, and one million civilians are in refugee camps in Darfur. The Foreign Minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, has warned that Sudanese soldiers would fight if foreign troops are sent to Darfur.The World Food Programme is using all-terrain trucks to get food to Darfur, which is being cut off by seasonal rains.

The Chadian government has asked for international aid agencies to help it cope with 170,000 Darfur refugees.. But the British government and the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, have said it is premature to talk of military intervention.The Sudanese government has said it is willing to disarm the janjaweed but insists that will not be done until the rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, also surrender their arms. Five countries, led by Pakistan, say the Sudanese government should be given more time.The British and American governments are also gathering evidence to decide whether the atrocities can be declared a genocide, which would invoke a legal obligation to intervene. It claims the rebel groups have killed 1,460 civilians since signing a ceasefire in April and are the main hindrance to getting aid to the region. The information minister, Al-Zahawi Ibrahim Malik, said: “Instead of using Darfur for electoral ends, as the American administration is doing, the world should push those involved to sit at the negotiating table.”The Sudanese government is jittery about threats of military intervention. A vote on the draft resolution is likely to be taken today or tomorrow.