Passenger jets in with explosives in his baggage

AUCKLAND AIRPORT was evacuated yesterday after a passenger flew in with an unexploded World War II artillery shell in his luggage.

The man is understood to have found the shell while diving in Vanuatu, and decided to bring it with him on his Air Vanuatu Boeing 737-800 flight, with 162 passengers on board.

The airport was partly locked down for an hour while the shell was taken away and destroyed by army bomb disposal officers.

Mike Garland had just collected his bags after flying in from Singapore when he and 400 other passengers were ‘‘herded’’ back to the luggage carousel by police, away from Customs.

‘‘The loud speaker said it was a critical incident, or something like that. But no one knew what it was. The authorities were cooler than a cucumber.’’

A colleague overheard a man had walked up to Customs and calmly declared what he called ‘‘a grenade’’.

‘‘They asked him if he had anything to declare, and he said a grenade. Suddenly there was a major emergency.’’

He said the man had put everyone on his flight in danger. ‘‘To take it on a plane is madness. If it had gone off, well you only have to blow a little hole in a plane for there to be potentially serious damage.’’

How the man got the shell on board not known.

A security official at Vanuatu’s Bauerfield International Airport, in the capital Port Vila, did not want to be named but insisted the airport had thorough security processes. ‘‘ You have to go through a walk-through detector, to detect metal in luggage and clothing,’’ he said. ‘‘When a passenger goes through departure, all their luggage is X- rayed to check for explosives or metals.’’

He said there were usually 15 or 16 security guards on shift to make sure every passenger underwent the checks. ‘‘They work an eight- hour shift, then others come for the change over.’’

He said if any device made it through, it would be by mistake, but staff were ‘‘ always going through training’’ about what devices were not allowed.

Bauerfield operations general manager Kevin Dick Abel said if a suspicious item had been picked up he would have been notified. ‘‘With all luggage we deal with,

is we have to remove all the packages if there is something suspicious, and question the passenger. We will go through all the machines and revisit all the decisions to find out what happened.’’

He said according to airport security rules, there was the potential for the staff member who let the shell through to be suspended. ‘‘All the screenings are taped, so we will be able to see what they did or didn’t do.’’

Police described the man’s actions as an ‘‘interesting case of stupidity’’, but said they would not charge him. ‘‘Taking an artillery shell on an international flight is unbelievable,’’ Inspector Earle McIntosh said.

A Customs spokeswoman said the man kept the shell as a souvenir. ‘‘He came off his flight and declared it. Customs protocol is to notify the police, and they took control of the operation.’’

But Garland is angry no charges would be laid. ‘‘The idiots, I think, have to be held to account.’’

Parts of Vanuatu’s coast are regarded as a treasure trove for divers. One of its most popular sites is Million Dollar Point, where thousands of tonnes of US military equipment was dumped in the sea, including munitions, guns, bulldozers and trucks, when the war ended.

Air Vanuatu could not be contacted comment.

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