A man who was going to miss his flight to Los Angeles called in a false bomb threat with the hope that a delay at the airport in Detroit would allow him to get there in time to board the plane, according to U.S. authorities.
The 23-year-old man was charged with maliciously giving false information about an explosive.
The phone call caused a scramble Thursday morning at the airport and the FBI said passengers on the Spirit Airlines plane were removed, interviewed and screened again. The flight didn’t leave until six hours later.
“Making this kind of threat undermines our collective sense of security and wastes valuable law enforcement resources,” U.S. Attorney Jerome Gorgon Jr. said.
The ploy didn’t work and FBI investigators – who connected the man to the threat through phone records – arrested him when he returned to the airport for another flight Thursday night.
He “stated that he made the call with the hope that it would delay the flight long enough for him to make it in time so he would not have to take a different flight,” the FBI said in a court filing.
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