Global General

Police blasted for planting explosives on passenger

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-01-09 10:33

DUBLIN: A 49-year-old electrician has emerged as an unlikely symbol of what can go wrong in the war on terror after authorities in Slovakia planted an explosive in his backpack to test airport security - then let it travel all the way to Ireland.

Police blasted for planting explosives on passenger

A plane rests on the tarmac of the Dublin Airport, where Slovak police unintentionally sent explosives on an airliner to test airport security in their country. [China Daily]

The incredible chain of events included a pilot taking off with the explosives on board, the Slovaks' failure to tell the Dublin airport or police about the incoming ordnance, and the man's arrest days later.

It all began Saturday when a policeman in Slovakia slipped 96 g of plastic explosive into Stefan Gonda's check-in luggage at the Poprad-Tatry Airport in central Slovakia as he and his wife were returning home to Ireland after a Christmas visit.

Slovak authorities said the bomb material and a dummy that smelled like explosives were hidden in the bag as a training test for a bomb-sniffing dog, who pinpointed the fake but missed the real thing.

But the police officer in charge got distracted and failed to remove the real explosives cache, the Slovak Interior Ministry said. That allowed the RDX plastic explosive to travel undetected through airport security and onto the Danube Wings aircraft.

Ireland's national police force, the Garda Siochana, said it received only a vague tip from their Slovak counterparts saying Gonda was suspected of possessing explosives - and the information came three days after the test on Saturday.

So officers pounced Tuesday, closing a busy intersection, evacuating several buildings, sending in the Irish army's bomb squad and taking Gonda into custody.

Gonda was released without charge three hours later after Slovakia's Embassy intervened with more information.

The Interior Ministry contended it informed the Dublin Airport of the explosives in a telex message Saturday while the aircraft was en route.

However, the Dublin Airport Authority and the Dublin Airport Police said they received no such warning - apparently because the telex was sent to an international baggage-handling company. The company, Servisair, said Wednesday it received the Slovaks' broken-English message - but didn't know what to make of it.

Clark Kent Ervin, the former inspector general of the US Homeland Security Department, called the test "crazy".

"It should be a controlled exercise," Ervin said. "It never should be done to someone unwittingly."

Jane's Aviation analyst Chris Yates agreed.

"The whole idea of putting devices in passenger bags scares the living daylights out of me, frankly. It leaves it wide open to a whole range of things, including theft," Yates said.

Yates said although professional-grade explosives wouldn't explode unless triggered by a detonator and power-timer unit, even well-packaged explosives could have left a chemical trace on Gonda's backpack.

"If he turned up at an airport with the same bag anytime soon and those traces were still on that bag, the passenger could be hauled aside and given the third degree if his bag was swabbed. You could conceivably end up on a (terrorist) watch list," he said.

In 2004, France stopped such tests after losing track of more than 100 g of explosives surreptitiously planted in an unwitting passenger's suitcase. It was never recovered.