Russian security drill causes alarm, traffic jam in St Petersburg

     
A bomb scare on a bus that alarmed passengers and caused a traffic jam in St Petersburg on Wednesday turned out to be a security drill that Russian police said aimed to test people's vigilance before the G20 summit in September.         

Passengers were forced to wait for two-and-a-half hours after a "suspicious package" was found on the seat of the bus after a man suddenly asked the driver to stop and got off, saying he had left something at home.          

The driver called police, who roped off the area and evacuated passengers and dogs signaled it might be bomb.           

"It later emerged that the suspicious package was a hoax explosive device, placed on a bus as part of an organized training exercise," St Petersburg police said on their website.           

Dmitry Kochetkov, a spokesman for Russia's FSB security services in St Petersburg, said the drill was carried out in preparation for the G-20 summit to be held in the city in September among other events, Itar-Tass news agency reported.           

The "training exercises designed to assess the effectiveness of anti-terrorism security on transport infrastructure ... was held on the threshold of events planned in the northern capital in the summer and fall of 2013," Kochetkov said.           

The incident recalled an episode in 1999 in which residents were evacuated from an apartment block in the city of Ryazan after the discovery of what they thought were explosives but turned out to be sacks of a harmless substance which the security services said they had planted in an exercise.           

Tension had been high at the time following a wave of bombings that killed nearly 300 people.             


REUTERS