Thousands were evacuated from a San Francisco International Airport terminal yesterday after security guards detected possible explosive residue on the shoes of a passenger, who vanished before he could be questioned.
An airport spokesman, Mr Mike McCarron, said the security breach occurred shortly before 7 a.m. when a man going through a random security check tested positive for some kind of explosive on his shoe.
"They screened his shoes by doing a trace wipe on them. The wipe came back as a possible positive hit of residue of some type. We don't know what yet," Mr McCarron said.
"When they went to ask the gentleman some more questions he was not there anymore. He was lost in the crowd."
The Federal Aviation Administration ordered US airports to perform random shoe checks in late December after a passenger, Mr Richard Reid (28), allegedly attempted to set fire to a pair of explosive runners on an American Airlines flight travelling from Paris to Miami. In San Francisco, officials immediately ordered the boarding area cleared, shutting some 30 gates in the airport's Terminal 3 and delaying as many as 80 domestic flights of United Airlines, the airport's busiest carrier.
In addition, passengers who had already boarded a number of jets were told to get off and go through security screening procedures again.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan's Interim Authority Chairman, Mr Hamid Karzai, weighed into the row over prisoners from the Afghan war saying he fully backed Mr Bush's stance on the Taliban and al-Qaeda captives flown to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"The people detained in Guantanamo are not prisoners of war," he said. "They are criminals, they brutalised people, they killed, they destroyed our land. But I want them to be treated nicely, I want there to be a difference between them and us," he said in New York, where he addressed the UN Security Council.
Later, a senior police official in southwestern Pakistan said his men had detained two senior Taliban members identified as the former chief justice, Mr Maulawi Noor Mohammad Saqib, and the deputy foreign minister, Mr Maulvi Abdul Rehman Zahid. The official said the two men arrived in the Quetta area some time ago and had been living with relatives.
Elsewhere, a militant Pakistani group believed to be holding the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl threatened to kill him within 24 hours and warned all US journalists to leave the country. The death threat, sent last night by e-mail to news organisations in the US and Pakistan claimed that Mr Pearl was an agent for the Israeli intelligence service Mossad. "Therefore we will execute him within 24 hours unless Amreeka (sic) fulfils our demands," the e-mail read.
Pearl disappeared a week ago from Karachi where he was researching a story on the shoe bomber Richard Reid. An earlier e-mail from an organisation calling itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty sent to news organisations at the weekend claimed responsibility.