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September 3, 2012

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Police detain man who admits hoax bomb call

A MAN whose hoax bomb warning caused a domestic flight to be diverted last Thursday was escorted by police to a detention center yesterday.

Xiong Yi, a 29-year-old resident of Shiyan City in Hubei Province, was flown to Wuhan, the provincial capital, yesterday morning.

"I was wrong, and I feel regret," he said after arriving at Wuhan Tianhe International Airport.

Police apprehended Xiong on Saturday in a hotel in Dongguan City in the southern province of Guangdong.

He confessed he had threatened to blow up the plane.

Xiong said he made an anonymous call to an airport in the southern city of Shenzhen at 10:43pm on Thursday, claiming that explosives had been planted on Shenzhen Airlines Flight ZH9706, which was in mid-air at the time, bound for Shenzhen from Xiangyang in Hubei.

Xiong said over the phone that the explosives would be detonated 45 minutes into the flight.

The plane made an emergency landing at an airport in Wuhan at 11:24pm.

Police conducted a thorough inspection but found no explosives or dangerous items on the aircraft or in passengers' belongings.

Besides criminal charges, Xiong will likely be subject to civil prosecution, according to sources at Wuhan Tianhe Airport.

The airport and Shenzhen Airlines are calculating the financial losses caused by the incident.

On Thursday evening, Wuan Tianhe Airport put an emergency response plan into operation and more than 30 vehicles and 200 people including public security officials, firefighters, medical staff, flight managers and armed police were dispatched to deal with the incident.

"It was quite an unexpected experience for me, with the announcement of the 'possibility of explosives on the plane'," said Peng Ruojie, a passenger on the flight, on his Weibo microblog.

"All the passengers got off the plane. We were surrounded. The security check was super-careful, with each piece of clothing checked," he said.

This incident followed a similar situation just the previous day.

An Air China flight from Beijing to New York returned to Beijing Capital International Airport after a threatening message was received on Wednesday evening.

But nothing amiss was found on the plane, which left for New York some hours later.






 

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