A terminal at Palm Beach International Airport in Florida was shut down for about two hours Tuesday evening after a passenger said he had a bomb in his bag.
The evacuation began shortly after 6:30 p.m. The Sheriff’s Office Bomb Squad and FBI officials were checking two bags, said Teri Barbera, a spokesperson for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.
“We have detained the person that has made the utterance that there is a bomb in his bag,” Barbera said in an email at 7 p.m.
Airport officials said in a tweet shortly after 8 p.m. that the concourse, Terminal C, began reopening.
The FBI will make any arrest, Barbera said.
Several airline passengers wrote in tweets Tuesday night that they were sitting on grounded planes or that the terminal was closing and they weren’t being told why. Another passenger said in a tweet his flight was told there was “unusual security activity.”
One person whose relatives were at the airport wrote in a tweet that the relatives deplaned and were moved to “a secure place.” A photo posted to Twitter shortly after 6 p.m. showed passengers standing behind yellow crime scene tape in the concourse.
Nicole Hughes, a spokesperson for the airport in West Palm Beach, said two JetBlue flights and a Delta flight that were scheduled to deplane at Terminal C unloaded at other gates.
All flights scheduled to depart from Terminal C were delayed, Hughes said, but she did not know how many.
Delta, Frontier, JetBlue, Spirit and Breeze Airways depart from Terminal C, according to the airport’s map. Terminals A and B remained open, Hughes said.
Additional information was not immediately available.
______
