La Guardia’s emergency ‘Bomb Scare’ was just passenger setting vintage camera, report says

An emergency response to a flight from Indianapolis landing at La Guardia Airport was based on a misunderstanding, according to the New York Daily News. Citing anonymous sources, the newspaper reported on Sunday afternoon that a woman on American Airlines flight 4817 mistook another passenger’s vintage camera for a bomb. She had seen a man scrolling through videos and photos of old cameras on his phone and thought he was looking for instructions on how to make bombs, the Daily News reports. When the man then allegedly took out his own camera and started tinkering with it, she assumed he was setting off an explosive.

After disembarking, federal agents and port authority officers detained the man for several hours. A spokesperson attributed the incident to unspecified “passenger behavior” at the time. Law enforcement investigating the incident have since jointly determined “there was no criminality on the part of the passenger” and released him without charge, a spokesperson for the passenger said on Sunday. Port authority.