Bottles of honey close down US airport
Source: Agencies |
January 7, 2010, Thursday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
SEEMINGLY suspicious pieces of luggage delayed flights at two United States airports on Tuesday, prompting evacuations in Minneapolis and closing a California airport where authorities discovered what turned out to be bottles filled with honey.
A passenger's suitcase tested positive for TNT at Bakersfield's Meadows Field during a routine swabbing of the bag's exterior, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said. When Transportation Security Administration officials opened the bag, they found bottles filled with an amber liquid, he said.
The bag's owner, Francisco Ramirez, told TSA officers that the bottles were filled with honey, Youngblood said. Further testing confirmed that honey was the only substance in the bottles, said FBI spokesman Steve Dupre. No traces of explosives were found.
"Why in this day and age would someone take a chance carrying honey in Gatorade bottles?" Youngblood said. "That itself is an alarm. It's hard to understand."
At the Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport, a bomb-sniffing dog indicated something suspicious about a piece of luggage, causing authorities to call a bomb squad and clear parts of the airport for more than an hour.
But the bag was never put on a flight and nothing was found, officials said.
The piece of luggage was only a placeholder airline employees put on the luggage carousel to signal to other employees that all the bags have been unloaded from a flight, airport spokesman Patrick Hogan said. In airport jargon, it's called a "last bag."
"It was kind of a beat-up old bag that was simply used as a marker," he said.
Investigators in California said Ramirez, 31, flew to Bakersfield on December 23 to spend Christmas with his sister and was returning on Tuesday. The gardener from Milwaukee was not arrested and was cooperating with authorities, officials said.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office bomb squad was performing further tests to determine why at least two positives were recorded for both TNT and the organic explosive acetone peroxide.
A passenger's suitcase tested positive for TNT at Bakersfield's Meadows Field during a routine swabbing of the bag's exterior, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said. When Transportation Security Administration officials opened the bag, they found bottles filled with an amber liquid, he said.
The bag's owner, Francisco Ramirez, told TSA officers that the bottles were filled with honey, Youngblood said. Further testing confirmed that honey was the only substance in the bottles, said FBI spokesman Steve Dupre. No traces of explosives were found.
"Why in this day and age would someone take a chance carrying honey in Gatorade bottles?" Youngblood said. "That itself is an alarm. It's hard to understand."
At the Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport, a bomb-sniffing dog indicated something suspicious about a piece of luggage, causing authorities to call a bomb squad and clear parts of the airport for more than an hour.
But the bag was never put on a flight and nothing was found, officials said.
The piece of luggage was only a placeholder airline employees put on the luggage carousel to signal to other employees that all the bags have been unloaded from a flight, airport spokesman Patrick Hogan said. In airport jargon, it's called a "last bag."
"It was kind of a beat-up old bag that was simply used as a marker," he said.
Investigators in California said Ramirez, 31, flew to Bakersfield on December 23 to spend Christmas with his sister and was returning on Tuesday. The gardener from Milwaukee was not arrested and was cooperating with authorities, officials said.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office bomb squad was performing further tests to determine why at least two positives were recorded for both TNT and the organic explosive acetone peroxide.
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