Police misplace training bomb at airport

PARIS, FRANCE -- Police at Paris' top airport lost track of a passenger's bag in which plastic explosives were placed to train bomb-sniffing dogs, police said Saturday. Warned that the bag may have gotten on any of nearly 90 flights from Charles de Gaulle, authorities searched planes arriving in Los Angeles and New York. French police said the explosives were harmless and there was no chance of their going off because no detonators were connected to them. More than 300 passengers were evacuated and their luggage searched Friday when their Air France flight from Charles de Gaulle landed in Los Angeles, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration said. Two Air France flights and one American Airlines flight to Paris were searched in New York. No explosives were found.

"Another sign of the moronic training at journalism schools...
the abscence of "French" or "France" from the headline..."

This story is a repeat of a post earlier today...
The original post linked to The South Carolina State paper.
Their headline was:

"French Police Misplace Explosives on Jet".

By the way, I was at CDG one day a few years ago, when someone had left a suitcase on thew sidewalk in front of a terminal.
The police roped off a large area and held up traffic for almost an hour. They then taped explosives to the bag and blew it up. It was mostly some man's underwear that flew everywhere, haha

Way back when dynamite was first invented a few other guys and myself, led by a guy we all affectionately called "Gunpowder" decided to borrow some materials from a strip mine across from my house high on Palentine Knob where the West Fork and Tygart's Valley rivers in confluence create the Monogahela; after a long night of celebrating the boredom of youth and several adventurous episodes of being fired over and chased a bit, we finally exhausted the few sticks and the caps and called it a night after being scared almost witless (I know, an arguable choice of words) by a restless ruminant whose bell was partly silenced by her heavy winter coat but still caused us to collapse beside a tower and barbed-wire fence laughing in relief when it fell free with a tilt of her lazy head and struck its sonorous tone.

Some weeks later, we decided to go back and retrieve the almost full box that we had secreted and carefully marked in our youthful minds with various outcroppings to allow us later to find it only to discover that we could not.

Try as hard as we might, and each of us tried more than once, to this day that almost full box of dynamite, which has surely reduced to a powdery nitroclycerinic mortar by now rests somewher near the edge of that 1,000+ foot cliff.

More details from http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=25&story_id=14711&name=French+police+lose+bomb+in+airport+training+blunder

French police lose bomb in airport training blunder

PARIS, Dec 5 (AFP) - French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin voiced his concern Sunday at a bungled training exercise by police who allowed a bag with a small amount of explosives to be flown out of the main Paris airport.

The slab, described by security officials as "no more dangerous than a bar of chocolate," was slipped into a hold-all by two dog-handlers.

They chose the bag at random as it passed along a conveyer belt between the check-in desks and aircraft loading bays at Charles de Gaulle airport.

The exercise Friday evening was designed to test the dogs' ability to sniff out drugs.

One successfully detected the item, but the other did not, but before they got another
chance, the bag had been whisked off towards its destination.

Police have no idea which of around 80 possible flights the bag was placed on, and have informed all the relevant airlines.

So far there is no news. "The explosives are totally harmless. They cannot react to shock or fire, and there is no detonator," assured an official.

An investigation is underway and the two dog-handlers may face disciplinary procedures, a spokesman said.

In a statement, Raffarin said that while the fight against terrorism was a government priority, he was "concerned" at how the exercise was carried out.

He "insisted such activities should henceforth be carried out according to criteria strictly guaranteeing the privacy of passengers," his office said.

Raffarin also underlined that the procedure was liable to raise the danger that the passenger would be placed under suspicion by foreign authorities when he or she arrived at their destination country.

In the meantime, police say the traveller might not even have noticed their extra baggage.

"It is a small blue case, between 50 and 60 centimetres long," a spokesman said, describing the hold-all. "It is quite possible that the person who owns it has still not found the explosives."

© AFP

Subject: French News

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