Plague scare professor sparks airport shutdown

A world-renowned scientist who sparked a bio-terrorism scare seven years ago was detained by police after a canister he was carrying sparking an airport shutdown and bomb squad search.

Officials shut down most of Miami International Airport overnight, woke nearby hotel guests and held Dr Thomas Butler until yesterday morning, when he was released without charge, a senior law enforcement official said.

Tests on the canister found nothing dangerous, said the official. Homeland Security spokesman Nicholas Kimball said the item resembled a pipe bomb.

Butler's former lawyer said the incident appeared to be a "fantastic overreaction".

Butler, 70, quickly became the focus of a US government investigation in 2003 when he reported that 30 vials of plague samples had possibly been stolen from his Texas Tech University lab.

He was later acquitted of smuggling and illegally transporting the potentially deadly germ and of lying to agents about the missing vials. But jurors found him guilty of the mislabelling and unauthorised export of a FedEx package that contained plague samples he sent to Tanzania.

He was also convicted of fraud and theft and sentenced to two years in prison for defrauding Texas Tech about illegally-negotiated contracts he had with pharmaceutical companies with which he also had clinical studies contracts.

The senior law enforcement official said last night that a Transportation Security Administration inspector noticed an odd container at around 9pm on Thursday as Butler was going through customs at Miami. He had arrived on a flight from the Middle East, where he had been teaching at a Saudi Arabian university.

The inspector ran Butler's name through a database and discovered that he had been tried on the plague-related charges. Officials decided to evacuate the airport and detain Butler, who co-operated fully, the law enforcement official said.

A Miami-Dade police bomb squad spent hours scouring the airport.

Butler was released after tests showed that he, the container and his other belongings did not contain any hazardous biological material or explosives, the official said.

The canister was used to transport dead bacteria samples and was a legitimate experiment, said another government official. Without naming Butler, the official said the scientist was a professor at Ross University, a medical school in Dominica, and on a teaching assignment in Saudi Arabia.

Before Butler's trial, leading scientific organisations had expressed concern about the criminal case against him and its effect on infectious disease research. Four Nobel laureates said in an open letter that Butler had been "subjected to unfair and disproportionate treatment".

Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who represented Butler in his unsuccessful appeals, said the scientist "has spent his entire life protecting and healing people in some of the most impoverished areas of the world. He would never do anything that would endanger people".

Butler's 2003 report of missing plague vials set off a frantic search that ended when he gave FBI agents a written statement in which he admitted a "misjudgment" in not telling his supervisor that the vials had been "accidentally destroyed", according to court records.

At his trial the scientist said FBI agents forced him to make the admission to calm the public's fears.

Mr Turley, who said he hoped to speak to Butler later, said the Miami incident "appears to be a fantastic overreaction" and is "ironic because we defeated all the national security counts in the case".

"The only plague claim he was convicted of was a highly technical paper violation; he literally checked the wrong box on the form.

"I find it strange to evacuate an airport because a guy was convicted of contractual violations with a university."

Peter Agre, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist who supported Butler against the 2003 charges, said: "I suspect because he's Tom Butler and on a list as coming from Saudi Arabia, he's being scrutinised and somebody pushed the panic button."

Butler, on supervised release from prison until 2008, agreed to retire from Texas Tech and to surrender his medical licence.

He was not currently licensed in Texas, a spokeswoman for the Texas Medical Board said last night.