Fake bomb threat shuts down part of Geneva airport

GENEVA–Geneva international airport was partly shut down for about an hour late Thursday after a man claimed he had parked a car full of explosives in front of the airport, Swiss media reported.

“This was a very concrete (threat), not just a suspicious package,” Bertrand Staempfli, a spokesman for the Cointrin airport, told the Tribune de Geneve daily’s online edition.

It was around 7:30 pm (1730 GMT) that the alarm was sounded after “a person broke through the security controls and said he had parked a vehicle in front of the airport full of explosives,” he explained.

A special bomb squad came to defuse any explosives, but when they opened the vehicle in question “they did not find explosives inside,” Staempfli said.

The man who made the threat has been handed over to the police, and the airport’s registration and departure areas were reopened at around 8:45 pm (1845 GMT), the paper reported.

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