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Did Usain Bolt’s Olympic dash trigger JFK airport scare?
Did boisterous celebrations over an Olympic victory by the world’s fastest man lead to a false alarm about gunfire and a panicked evacuation of Kennedy Airport?
New York
That’s one of the possibilities police were exploring Monday as they reviewed security camera footage and interviewed witnesses about the chain-reaction scare that rippled through two airport terminals Sunday night in the minutes after Usain Bolt sprinted to a gold medal victory in the 100-meter dash.
An internal New York Police Department briefing document, obtained by The Associated Press, said a preliminary video review showed that some travelers had started to act “extremely disruptive’’ while watching the Olympics on televisions in Terminal 8. That set off a chain reaction, with other people running away from the commotion, the document said.
Then, at 9:34 pm, about seven minutes after Bolt’s run, police received an anonymous 911 call from a woman reporting gunshots in the terminal.
It isn’t clear how the celebration might have come to be misinterpreted a few minutes later as gunshots.
Investigators were also unsure exactly how the commotion spread across the airport campus to Terminal 1, where rumors about a shooter, combined with the sound of alarms and sight of armed police, convinced some people that an attack was underway.
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