Bomb affair 'traumatised' arrested Slovak electrician

THE SLOVAK electrician who unwittingly carried explosives on a flight from Poprad-Tatry to Dublin airport claims he was traumatised by the Garda’s “incomprehensible” handling of the affair.

In his first public comments since the incident, Stefan Gonda (49) stuck closely to the line presented by the Slovak government in a case that exposed the country to international ridicule.

Mr Gonda travelled to Dublin on the January 2nd Danube Wings flight from Poprad-Tatry in central Slovakia, unaware that his rucksack held 96 grammes of high-grade plastic explosive which a policeman had forgotten to remove after conducting a test for his sniffer dog.

Three days later, gardaí responded to information received from Slovakia by closing roads and evacuating buildings around Mr Gonda’s flat on Dorset Street in central Dublin, where he was arrested and the explosives were retrieved.

After calls between the Garda and officials in Slovakia and the country’s embassy in Dublin, Mr Gonda was released.

He returned to his homeland shortly afterwards and has stayed out of the public eye as the government and police endured criticism from opposition parties and media.

Only one senior policeman has resigned over the incident, which the government has blamed on the dog-handler, who, after forgetting about the explosives, then failed to tell his police superiors about the incident for some 48 hours. He did immediately tell air traffic controllers but they wrongly informed the pilot of the Boeing 737 that the explosives were not real.

The interior and transport ministers have refused to step down over the fiasco, which opposition parties say lays bare serious systemic problems in security and air safety procedures.

The electrician said he had received a call from Slovak police late on Monday, January 4th, more than two days after he flew back to Dublin. “I checked my back-pack and after a while, I found a small plastic bag containing a grey substance in the hip straps,” he said, emphasising that “this bag was not inside the back-pack”.

He says gardaí called him twice the following morning, before mounting the major security operation. “I was for several hours detained for reasons that to me are incomprehensible, and this traumatised me,” he said.

At the time, gardaí said they had been notified about the explosives by the Dublin Airport Authority, which had received a call on the matter from Slovakia.

“We couldn’t be sure that the call to Dublin airport was genuinely from the Slovak authorities,” a Garda source said. “When somebody is found with explosives here, he is arrested, it’s that simple.”

Mr Gonda also said that for privacy reasons, he had asked interior minister Robert Kalinak not to disclose details of the compensation that he would receive; the government has come under heavy fire for refusing to give information on the compensation and other details of the affair.

Leading opposition MP Martin Fedor said: “To me it seems to appear more than unusual that Mr Gonda has decided to speak out about the case to media only after the negotiations with minister Kalinak about compensation were settled. The opposition will assemble a special parliamentary meeting to hold a no-confidence vote against him on Friday.”