Public healthPassenger causing Thursday airport shutdown was at center of 2003 plague scare
A passenger on a flight back from Saudi Arabia appeared to be carrying a suspicious canister — and TSA security checkers became even more alarmed when they realized that the passenger was the scientist who sparked a bioterrorism scare after he reported missing vials of plague samples in 2003; between 100 and 200 passengers were evacuated from four of the airport’s six concourses; airport roadways and a hotel near the airport’s international terminal were closed down
The suspicions airport security officials had when they saw the metal canister grew when they learned about the individual who brought it in from the Middle East: a scientist who sparked a bioterrorism scare after he reported missing vials of plague samples seven years ago.
Crestview News Bulletin reports that officials shut down most of Miami International Airport overnight, roused nearby hotel guests from their beds, and detained Dr. Thomas Butler until Friday morning, when he was released without charges, a senior law enforcement official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.
Tests on the canister found nothing dangerous, according to a release from the FBI’s Miami field office. DHS spokesman Nicholas Kimball said the item resembled a pipe bomb.
Butler’s former lawyer said the incident appeared to be a “fantastic overreaction.”
Butler, 70, is a world-renowned plague researcher who quickly became the focus of a federal investigation in 2003 when he reported that thirty vials of plague samples possibly had been stolen from his Texas Tech University lab.
He was later acquitted of smuggling and illegally transporting the potentially deadly germ, and of lying to federal agents about the missing vials. Jurors found Butler guilty of the mislabeling and unauthorized export of a FedEx package that contained plague samples he sent to Tanzania.
He was also convicted of fraud and theft and sentenced to two years in prison for defrauding Texas Tech about illegally negotiated contracts he had with pharmaceutical companies with which he also had clinical studies contracts.
Before Butler’s trial, leading scientific organizations expressed concern about the criminal case against him and its effect on infectious disease research. Four Nobel laureates said in an open letter that Butler had been “subjected to unfair and disproportionate treatment.”
Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who represented Butler in his unsuccessful appeals, said the scientist “has spent his entire life protecting and healing people in some of the most impoverished areas of the world. He would never do anything that would endanger people.”
The senior law enforcement official told AP that a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) inspector noticed an odd container around 9 p.m. Thursday as Butler was going through customs. He had arrived on a flight from the Middle East, where he had been teaching at a Saudi Arabian university.
The inspector ran Butler’s name through a database and discovered that he had been tried on
