An Israel passenger trying to board a domestic flight at Newark International Airport was arrested Sunday morning for falsely claiming a bomb was in his suitcase, which was loaded on his flight even though he had been bumped.
In a separate incident, another man was arrested at the airport for inexplicably claiming a bomb was in his shoe. He may though he was being funny, but security authorities thought otherwise and arrested him.
The Israeli man, 44-year-old Eran Hess from Tel Aviv, was not trying to be funny. He was furious.
After he was told by United Airlines that there was no room for him and his family on their connecting flight to Miami, even though his luggage had been loaded, he apparently thought that he could recover his family’s suitcases with a bomb threat.
“He had left the area by the time our cops got there, so they tracked him down in Terminal A, where he was trying to get on an American Airlines flight to Miami,” said Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey told the New Jersey Star Ledger’s website.
He was charged with creating a false public alarm.
David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, told the website that passengers were taken off the plane while bags were unloaded and rescreened.
The other arrest involved a New Jersey resident shoe-bomb hoax shut down the airport checkpoint for seven minutes.