Failed Slovak airport security test ends up with explosives on plane, shocks security experts

Aviation experts shocked at Slovak plane test

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — A failed airport security test ended up with a Slovak man unwittingly carrying hidden explosives in his bag aboard a flight to Dublin, Slovak officials admitted Wednesday — a snafu that enraged Irish officials and shocked aviation experts.

While the Slovaks blamed the incident on “a silly and unprofessional mistake,” Irish officials said it was foolish for the Slovaks to hide actual bomb parts in the luggage of innocent passengers under any circumstances.

They were also angry that it took the Slovaks three days to tell them about the mistake on Saturday and that the pilot of the airplane decided to fly to Dublin anyway even after being told that an explosive was in his aircraft’s checked luggage.

Irish authorities shut down a major Dublin intersection Tuesday and evacuated people from several apartment buildings as Irish Army experts examined the explosive.

The unwitting passenger was identified by Irish police as Stefan Gonda, a 49-year-old Slovak electrician who lives in Ireland. He was detained for several hours before police let him go without charge Tuesday.

Security experts said the episode illustrated the inadequacy of the screening of checked-in luggage — the very point the Slovak authorities had sought to test when they placed the bomb components in passengers’ bags Saturday.

Clark Kent Ervin, the former inspector general of the U.S. Homeland Security Department called the episode “crazy.”

“It should be a controlled exercise,” Ervin said. “It never should be done to someone unwittingly.”

Aviation analyst Chris Yates called the mistake significant and said someone should be fired for it.

“The whole idea of putting devices in passenger bags scares the living daylights out of me, frankly. It leaves it wide open to a whole range of things, including theft,” Yates told The Associated Press in London.

“Anything could happen,” he said. “That bag could go through a different carousel in the airport, you could lose it and you get the situation where you have RDX plastic explosive loaded into the cargo hold of an airplane, flown to another destination and then you have to find the damn thing.”

Yates said airport security was constantly tested by a range of authorities, including the European Union, but it did not involve innocent passengers.

“The way it’s done in most places is that undercover investigators will go in acting as a normal passenger, check in, go through the security process and so on, and if the devices they are carrying in their bags are not discovered they declare themselves and serious questions are asked,” he explained.

Slovak Interior Minister Robert Kalinak expressed “profound regret” to the Irish government for the oversight and the delay in alerting them authorities.

But his ministry, in a statement, still claimed that “no one was in danger (during the flight) because the substance, without any other components (detonators) and under the conditions it was stored, is not dangerous.”

The ministry said it ordered an immediate halt to such tests and took steps to prevent a repeat, while Tibor Mako, the head of Slovakia’s border and foreign police whose people carried out the exercise, offered his resignation. There was no immediate word on whether it would be accepted.

“The aim of the training was to keep sniffer dogs in shape and on alert in a real environment,” the ministry said.

Still, details emerging from the failed exercise heightened concerns that basic precautions were not taken, with the ministry saying that when Slovak authorities realized their error and told the pilot of the Danube Wings flight, he still decided to take off with the explosives on board.

It was not clear what any other airport or airline officials, either in Slovakia or Dublin, knew about the failed security test.

Even the basic facts of airport test were in dispute Wednesday.

Irish officials said the Slovaks told them nine real bomb components were placed into the bags of nine different passengers at two airports, including Bratislava Airport and Poprad-Tatry Airport in central Slovakia. Eight items were detected, the Irish said, adding that one bag had two bomb components in it.

Slovak officials say they only attached two caches of explosives onto the outside of one man’s bag.

The sniffer dog found one explosive but the police officer in charge failed to remove the second, which was not detected by the dog, from the bag because he was busy, the Slovakian interior ministry statement said.

That allowed 90 grams (3 ounces) of RDX plastic explosive to travel undetected through security at Poprad-Tatry Airport onto a Danube Wings aircraft. The Slovak carrier launched services to Dublin last month.

“The police officer made a silly and unprofessional mistake, which turned the good purpose of protecting people into a problem,” the ministry statement said.

Slovak border police subsequently traced the man and told him where the explosive was planted so that he was able to find it Monday evening, said the ministry. Kalinak, the interior minister, called him to apologize.

But the Slovak ministry admitted it did not contact Irish authorities and explain the situation until Tuesday. That prompted Irish police to raid the man’s Dublin apartment and detain him for several hours then released without charge.

Irish police said they initially were led to believe the man might be a terrorist until the Slovaks explained the situation further.

Irish Justice Minister Dermot Ahern said Dublin police eventually confirmed that the explosive “was concealed without his knowledge or consent … as part of an airport security exercise.”

The Slovak statement criticized the Irish police action.

“For an incomprehensible reason for us, they took the person into custody and undertook further security measures,” it said.

Authorities in Slovakia were considering “new forms of sniffer dog training” to avoid a repeat of the scare, the ministry said.

Aviation security experts in Israel, considered to be among the top in the world, said the failed test was shocking.

Rafi Sela, president of AR Challenges, a consulting firm specializing in homeland security, said Israel conducts daily drills in which people try to smuggle mock explosives, but the explosives are monitored at all times and are handled by volunteers, never by unwitting travelers.

“Nothing has ever happened like that in Israel and it never will because we operate differently here,” he told the AP. “It’s extremely dangerous what happened there. We send people to try and get through security all the time to test the system but explosives are always closely monitored and would never end up unattended like that.”

In neighboring Hungary, officials said placing explosives secretly in a passenger’s luggage is against the law.

The Slovak incident was reminiscent of a French security exercise gone awry six years ago, when a bag of plastic explosives hidden intentionally in an unwitting passenger’s luggage went missing.

Police had placed explosives in the side pocket of a suitcase in an exercise to train bomb-sniffing dogs at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport. The bag, containing nearly 5 ounces (more than 100 grams) of explosives, was not seen again.

French police said at the time there was no chance the explosives could go off since they were not connected to detonators, but the incident caused widespread criticism. The French subsequently stopped placing explosives intentionally into passengers’ luggage for training.

Associated Press writer Shawn Pogatchnik in Dublin, Angela Charlton in Paris, and Pablo Gorondi in Budapest, and Josef Federman in Israel contributed to this report.