Clueless TSA agents found two possible pipe bombs in a passenger’s luggage yesterday at La Guardia Airport — and kept them in a public area for six hours without notifying cops, The Post has learned.
The Transportation Security Administration bozos at one point left the pipes — which eventually turned out to be harmless — resting on a radiator as hundreds of fliers passed through security nearby, sources said.
“Six hours to report a potential bomb? It’s outrageous,” one Port Authority police official fumed.
The stunning security screw-up, a violation of TSA policy of alerting police to all suspicious activity, began at about 11:30 a.m. at the central terminal when the male flier’s bags passed through an X-ray machine, the sources said.
“When I saw the image, I took a step backward and said, ‘What’s that?!’ ” one startled TSA employee said, according to police sources.
Another screener saw the objects, one gold, the other silver, and both 6-inches long with “springs” inside, and thought they could be bombs, the sources said.
The screeners promptly called their supervisor. He questioned the passenger, who claimed the pipes were for homeopathic medicine.
The supervisor bought the story and let the man board his flight without taking down any information, the sources said.
The flier left the pipes behind and it wasn’t until 3 p.m., with the devices still lying around the screening area, when the supervisor finally realized he should notify someone.
He called a TSA bomb specialist — who took another two hours to arrive.
The expert decided the pipes could, indeed, be dangerous and notified the PAPD bomb squad. It shut down the area and hauled the objects away to the police bomb range in the Bronx, where they were found to be not a threat.
A TSA spokesman later insisted the items were “voluntarily surrendered” and the agency notified cops only “out of an abundance of caution.”
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