Passengers and staff at London Heathrow Airport were in stitches Thursday thanks to a merry prankster who told police he’d hidden a bomb in Terminal 1.
This “bomb hoax,” as it’s being called, was a welcome surprise during a stressful holiday travel period.
“Earlier this morning, a giggling individual telephoned Heathrow to say that a bomb had been placed in Terminal 1,” said Metropolitan Police Inspector Robin Moore, biting his finger in a desperate bid to not laugh. “The airport was evacuated in the most amusing manner possible, with comically-stern immigration officials insisting on checking the passports of fainting passengers, and funny fat men getting corked in body scanners, allowing us to see what what they had for breakfast.”
“In addition,” Moore said, “hundreds of snobby rich women got trampled as they delivered funny, caricaturistic lines such as, ‘my goodness, that’s a real Hermès Birkin handbag you’re stepping on.’”
Jovial, red-faced policemen with bomb-sniffing dogs scoured the airport and concluded the whole thing was staged.
“Why, it’s just a hoax,” proclaimed one policeman, prompting waves of booming laughter from passengers picking themselves up off the ground.
“What sort of devilish genius would come up with such a hilarious idea?” said Justine Cass, 62, who missed her flight to Toronto to witness the birth of her granddaughter. “I laughed so hard I peed myself.”
Police say this is the second time such a funny hoax has been carried out at the airport. The first was in 2005 when a woman on a taxiing Boeing 747 apologized to fellow passengers for the toxic gas that she might accidentally release during the flight.