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Six bomb threats in barely 12 hours
1 minuto de lectura'
LA NACIONFernando Rodríguez
Over a period of 12 hours, six bomb threats forced evacuations and cancellations of essential services, and set off alarms for the security of the summit of the G-20 that will take place in Costa Salguero between Friday, November 30 and Saturday, December 1. Athough nobody took responsability, qualified sources of the government believe the incidents are related to the event that will take place in Buenos Aires at the end of next week.
The first four events turned out to be false alarms: at the United States embassy, located in Palermo; in the San Martín railway, in José C. Paz; in the Álvarez hospital, in the Flores district, and in the headquarters of Banco Galicia, in the city of Buenos Aires.
A fifth case is in the process of being investigated: a suspicious package was found in a bathroom in the Library of Congress, located on Hipólito Yrigoyen 1750, and the building had to be evacuated this afternoon. The Federal Police reviewed the place.
The sixth was a threat in the annex of the Senate. The building was evauated. It all began in the early hours of the morning, when Federal Police officers carrying out preventive tasks in the railway service discovered, under one of the trains, a bag containing six grenades of type FM1 and a smoke grenade.
The discovery forced the interruptionof the train service of the line that covers the route between Open Door, in Luján, and Retiro. The autorities established that the grenades, an old military model, were obsolete and had lost their explosive capacity. At 7.30 am the situation was back to normal. Meanwhile, at the US embassy, t was reported that during a routine security review the employees discovered a suspicious package. An operation was quickly mounted in the building located on 4300 Colombia Avenue and its surroundings, which included the evacuation of consular personnel.
Staff of the Explosives Division of the Federal Police reviewed the facilities and determined that it had been a false alarm. After nine in the morning the embassy resumed its usual operations. At 9.30 a call reported the existence of an explosive device in Teodoro Álvarez hospital, which turned out to be another false alarm.
