Montreal Airport alert as man 'tries to board plane with bomb components'
Investigators bemused as to why a man aged 71 tried to take all of the components, except for explosives, on a Montreal-Los Angeles flight
The contents of a carry-on bag of a man, 71, disrupted flights at Montreal's airport for hours over the weekend and led to a partial evacuation of the man's neighbourhood in the city.
But when the suspect appeared in court on Monday to face criminal charges, it was still unclear why he had tried to take on a Los Angeles-bound flight what the police described as all but one component needed to make a bomb.
The mystery was complicated by reports that the suspect, who was born in Iran and had gone by the Iranian name Houshang Nazemi, legally changed it 27 years ago to the Italian-sounding Antony Piazza, and that under his original name, he had once been sentenced to 10 years in prison for trafficking heroin.
Piazza had arrived early on Sunday at Montreal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau airport for his flight to Los Angeles, the police said. There, a routine security inspection uncovered various objects hidden in the pullout handle of his carry-on bag.
Neither the police nor prosecutors have specifically identified the objects other than to say that they were all the components necessary to make a bomb except the explosive material.
On Monday, Piazza's lawyer, Louis Morena, said the police "were talking about bullets, talking about powder, about wires" and cigarette lighters.
Once the materials were found, security officials shut down a section of the airport for several hours, effectively stopping all flights to the United States.
