Milwaukee man's honey shuts down California airport

Posted: Jan. 5, 2010

A suspicious material found inside luggage that prompted the shutdown of a California airport Tuesday morning turned out to be five soft-drink bottles filled with honey, authorities said.

A passenger's suitcase tested positive for TNT at Bakersfield's Meadows Field during a routine swabbing of the bag's exterior, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said. When TSA officials opened the bag, they found bottles filled with an amber liquid, he said.

"Why in this day and age would someone take a chance carrying honey in Gatorade bottles?" Youngblood asked. "That itself is an alarm. It's hard to understand."

Investigators said the bag's owner, Francisco Ramirez, 31, is a gardener from Milwaukee who has been cooperating with authorities. He flew to Bakersfield Dec. 23 to spend Christmas with his sister and was returning Tuesday when the alarm sounded.

When TSA agents opened one of the bottles and tested the contents, the resulting fumes nauseated them, Youngblood said. Both were treated and released at a local hospital.

All flights into and out of Meadows Field were canceled for much of Tuesday as authorities searched the terminal for other potential explosives.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office bomb squad was expected to perform further tests on the honey to determine why at least two false positives were recorded for both TNT and the organic explosive acetone peroxide, or TATP. Bakersfield is about 110 miles north of Los Angeles.

Investigators want to know whether any chemical Ramirez uses in his gardening work could have left traces of potential explosives. They will also run tests on the honey to see if the smoke beekeepers use to subdue the insects could have triggered the false positive test.

Ramirez was not arrested Tuesday. Authorities initially questioned his immigration status, but U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice said Tuesday afternoon that Ramirez is a legal permanent resident of the U.S.

Also Tuesday, Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport was partially evacuated for about an hour after a bomb-sniffing dog identified a bag on a luggage carousel as suspicious. The bag was later determined to be harmless.

Spokesman Patrick Hogan of the Metropolitan Airports Commission said the bag was never on a plane and was only a placeholder typically left by airline employees to signal other employees that the airplane is empty.

Portions of the baggage and ticketing areas were shut down as well as a road in front of the airport after the bag was found at 2 p.m. All of the gates and baggage claims reopened at 3:20 p.m.