KARACHI — Pakistan police Tuesday released a man who was detained at Karachi airport as he tried to board a plane for the Middle East with batteries and an electrical circuit in his shoes, police said.
Faiz Mohammad, a 30-year-old civil engineer, was held on Sunday when a scanner sounded an alarm as he proceeded towards boarding a Thai Airways flight to Muscat.
Mohammad, who not carrying any explosives, told police his footwear had an inbuilt massage system.
Police and intelligence agencies questioned him extensively before clearing him of trying to commit any terror activity in the plane, Karachi's chief police investigator Niaz Khoso said.
"The joint investigation team extensively questioned and in the end found him innocent," Khoso told AFP. "The man has been released," he said.
"We also engaged our experts and people in the market who confirmed that the shoes he was wearing were for massage comfort and easily available in the market," Khoso said.
He said that as it was the first such incident "it made all of us alarmed." Karachi's Airport Security Force spokesman Mohammad Munir on Sunday called the discovery of four batteries, a circuit and an on-off button in Mohammad's shoes as "worrying".
Khoso said the detention was not a mock exercise by the airport authorities to check their security efficiency. "It was certainly not a sort of mock exercise. The problem was just that no passenger in the past had earlier been seen with such shoes," he said.
Mohammad told investigators that he was travelling to Muscat, where he had worked for a construction company, to set up his own business.
Pakistan suffers from chronic violence at the hands of Islamist militants. Bomb attacks across the country have killed 3,300 people since July 2007.
A British man, Richard Reid, tried to blow up a transatlantic jet in December 2001 with explosives hidden in his shoes.
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