Elusive Mouse Grounds Airliner For 13 Hours

A mouse upset the best-laid plans of an airline and nearly 250 passengers in the Philippines, grounding a plane for 13 hours while engineers tried to smoke out the rodent.

The plane, a Qatar Airways airliner, was preparing for take-off from Manila airport when a crew member spotted the mouse scampering across an aisle in the economy class section, airport officials said.

The captain ordered the passengers to disembark while maintenance staff fumigated the aircraft and laid traps, but the mouse was nowhere to be found. The Qatar-bound aircraft eventually took off 13 hours late, presumably with the mouse still on board, dead or alive.

"There was an incident before with a cockroach, but it's the first time that we had to deal with a mouse", airport operations chief Octavio Lina said.

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