This is the way French police use to train bomb sniffing dogs.
On Friday evening two dog-handlers placed a nearly five ounce bar of plastic explosive inside a random bag as it passed on a conveyor belt between check-in and the aircraft loading bays at Paris' Charles-de-Gaulle airport.
In a “momentary lack of surveillance” the bag was whisked off towards its destination. Trouble is no one knows whose bag it was or even which one of 90 flights the bag was placed on.
Even though the French police assure everyone the explosives are totally harmless, airlines, airports and police forces around the world have been alerted to watch for a piece of luggage:
"It is a small blue case between 50 and 60 centimetres long. It is quite possible that the person who owns it has still not found the explosives," said a spokesperson for the police at Charles-de-Gaulle airport.
KABC Channel 7 reports that when Flight 70, arrived at LAX nonstop from Paris last night, it was directed to the western edge of the tarmac at LAX, where the passengers were evacuated and the plane was searched.
The 362 passengers and crew members were taken to the International Terminal and screened, said Nancy Castles of Los Angeles World Airports. The search was completed by about 1:30 a.m., and no explosives were found, she said.
The Associated Press reports that three other airliners that had left Charles de Gaulle were searched at New York City's JFK airport.
It won't happen again. French police ended their practice of hiding plastic explosives in air passengers' luggage to train bomb-sniffing dogs on Sunday. France's Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin says the practice was "susceptible to making the relevant passenger run a risk in the eyes of foreign authorities when arriving in the destination country."
Ya think?
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