In a shocking security breach, police at Kennedy Airport released a man who had flown a suitcase full of lethal explosives aboard an airliner from the Middle East, authorities revealed yesterday. Port Authority cops seized the Soviet-made military ordnance last month, but let its owner, Shaun Marshall, go - only to learn later the devices could have detonated and destroyed the aircraft, killing everyone aboard.
(What a goof up!)
Authorities had remained silent about the Aug. 19 incident, until it was disclosed yesterday in papers filed in Brooklyn Federal Court. Marshall, a medic with State Department defense contractor DynCorp Inc., apparently told cops he found the weapon on the ground in Afghanistan. He said he thought it was inert and kept it as a souvenir.
| How did he know they were inert -- tap the detonators with a small ball-peen hammer? |
By the time NYPD bomb squad detectives were summoned to the airport, Marshall, 28, of Riverside, Calif., was en route to Khartoum Los Angeles on another flight. The breach of security began in Dubai when Marshall checked a suitcase containing a Soviet V429 projectile detonating fuse, a 23-mm. Soviet military surface-to-air and air-to-air cartridge and nine bullets aboard a United Arab Emirates jet. Sources said the suspicious contents were detected by X-ray screeners at Kennedy Airport and Marshall was interviewed by doughnut-chewing Port Authority cops. According to the federal complaint, airport cops released Marshall so he could get on a connecting flight home, and then contacted the NYPD bomb squad. "The Soviet detonating fuse and cartridge were ... highly explosive," the complaint states. The FBI was contacted and agents in Los Angeles were scrambled to take Marshall into custody. He was later indicted on charges of recklessly transporting an explosive device on an aircraft. He is scheduled to be arraigned on Friday before Federal Judge Allyne Ross in Brooklyn. A PA spokesman declined comment on how its cops handled the incident.
They're waiting on a documents handwriting public relations expert to tell them what to say. |
Retired NYPD Sgt. Chris Brauer of the bomb squad said detonating fuses and shells are transported via air by the military - but never in the same container. "It's dangerous putting them together in a suitcase like that," said Brauer, of Michael Stapleton Associates, a security firm in Manhattan.
Marshall faces up to 20 years in prison, if convicted. |