Officials evacuated Terminal C at Palm Beach International Airport on Tuesday evening after a passenger said he had a bomb in his bag, said Teri Barbera, a spokesperson for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.
The evacuation was underway shortly after 6:30 p.m. The Sheriff’s Office Bomb Squad and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials were checking two bags, Barbera said.
“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.
Several flight 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 Palm Beach International Airport, said two JetBlue flights and a Delta flight that were scheduled to deplane at Terminal C were unloading at other gates.
All flights scheduled to depart from Terminal C were delayed, Hughes said, but she did not know how many.
Travelers should check with their airline, officials said.
Delta, Frontier, JetBlue, Spirit and Breeze Airways depart from Terminal C, according to the airport’s map. Terminals A and B remain open, Hughes said. It was not immediately clear when Terminal C will reopen.
Additional information was not immediately available.
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