France's interior minister called it "scandalous." The Figaro newspaper called it ridiculous. But the bottom line, four days after gendarmes at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle International Airport planted explosives in an unsuspecting passenger's suitcase, was that nobody knew where the explosives had gone.
"We hope the person who finds this will take it to the local authorities," said a spokesman for the gendarmerie, France's national police, who planted the mobile-phone-size lump of plastic explosives as part of an exercise to train bomb-sniffing dogs.
"We hope they don't throw it away." he said on Monday. The police are working on the assumption that the explosives, which had no detonator, left Paris aboard a flight between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Friday, said the spokesman, Pierre Bouquin.
About 90 planes left the airport during that period for international destinations, including Italy, Japan, Brazil and the United States, as well as various French cities.
No passenger has contacted the French authorities to report discovering the explosives, the police said on Monday. They said there was no chance the material could go off as it was not connected to a detonator.
Bouquin said the explosives, if detonated, "would not be enough to blow up a building" but would probably be enough to blow a door from a car. He said the incident had occurred because of an "error of surveillance for 10 seconds or a little more."
According to accounts by the police, the suitcase was chosen at random after its owner checked it in, and the explosives were inserted by bomb squad gendarmes. A sniffer dog successfully identified the bag, a dark blue suitcase, but a second dog failed to do so, and before anyone noticed the bag had disappeared down a conveyor belt.
On Sunday, as word of the incident spread, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin expressed mild concern, and Bouquin said the practice of using real explosives in such tests would stop.On Monday, Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin weighed in, describing the incident as "totally reprehensible and scandalous" and vowing that those responsible would be punished.
Le Figaro, the leading newspaper of France's conservative establishment, poured scorn on the police in a front-page article Monday. "The gendarmerie's press service spoke of an 'unfortunate error,' although there is rarely a fortunate one," it said, adding that the police had "already faced their toughest sanction: ridicule."
Meanwhile, travel authorities worldwide were still looking for the explosives. The U.S. Transportation Security Administration said it was informed about the incident by the French police on Friday. Three of the flights that could have contained the explosives were bound for Los Angeles and one for New York's Kennedy Airport. The planes were searched - in one case, 362 California-bound passengers on an Air France flight were evacuated and delayed for three hours - but the luggage in question was not found.
Unless the explosives were planted in the bag of a passenger with the desire and know-how to use them, the incident poses more of a threat to French pride than to aviation security, experts said.
George Novak, the lead researcher at George Washington University's aviation institute, in Ashburn, Virginia, said in a telephone interview that the incident "could have happened anywhere." He noted that the security services on both sides of the Atlantic regularly carried out similar exercises, with both real and simulated explosives.
