Woman arrested at Boston airport after bomb scare

By Scott Malone

BOSTON (Reuters) - Police arrested a 19-year-old student at gunpoint at Boston's Logan International Airport on Friday in a scare sparked by what authorities thought was a bomb strapped to her body but she claimed was artwork.

Star Simpson, a sophomore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told police the device -- a circuit board measuring roughly 2 inches by 6 inches, with protruding wires, lights and a nine-volt battery -- was an art project.

Simpson approached an information counter at the airport's arrivals terminal around 8 a.m. (1200 GMT) to inquire about a passenger on an arriving flight. She wore a black, hooded sweatshirt with the circuit board on the front and the words "Socket to me, Course VI" on the back.

She was also carrying modeling clay.

After speaking with a service agent, she walked out of the airport. Within two minutes Simpson was approached by police with sub-machine guns, police said.

She was charged with possession of a hoax device and released on $750 bail. The charge carries a penalty of up to five years in prison.

"It was an innocuous device," Maj. Scott Pare of the Massachusetts State Police said at a press conference at the airport, which was the departure point for the two hijacked airliners that were crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11.

"Thankfully, she complied and so she ended up in a cell and not in a morgue," Pare said. "Had she not complied, deadly force might have been used."

Pare said Simpson was arrested outdoors and airport operations were not affected by the incident.

Simpson could not be reached for comment.

The incident comes eight months after Boston residents were spooked by a series of devices with blinking lights that were posted in public places around the city to promote a television cartoon.

Those devices also proved harmless, and raised some public criticism that authorities overreacted in closing major roads and bridges and mobilizing hundreds of police.

(Additional reporting by Kevin McNicholas.)