Mysterious parcel alarms Spotsylvania lawmen

By KARI PUGH

Date published: 6/30/2004

The CIA wouldn't confirm or deny. The FBI said it wasn't sure where it came from.

Spotsylvania County deputies didn't care, they were just glad the contents of the mysterious black briefcase weren't the real thing.

A man who lives in the 9800 block of Leavells Road in Spotsylvania found the briefcase in the woods behind his house Saturday evening.

It looked so strange, he didn't open it. Instead, he carefully placed it on the trunk of his car and called police.

When a deputy took a peek inside, he saw terrorism manuals, vials marked as biological agents and files upon files in Arabic, Sheriff Howard Smith said yesterday.

The deputy quickly called for backup, set up a perimeter around the area and had his superiors notify the FBI.

When an agent from the FBI's Domestic Terrorism Group arrived, he immediately recognized the briefcase as a training aid. He told authorities he thought it probably belonged to the CIA.

"When we called the CIA, they would neither confirm or deny whether it was theirs," Smith said.

The briefcase was taken to the FBI Laboratory at Quantico Marine Corps Base for further examination.

It wasn't until yesterday that the FBI let Spotsylvania authorities know the briefcase belonged to them, after all.

But how it got there is still a mystery.

"We'll probably never know," Smith said.

A similar incident in February 2003 shut down Spotsylvania's Southpoint Plaza off U.S. 1 after a McDonald's employee found a pipe bomb in a trash bin.

The device turned out to be an inert bomb used by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in training at Fort A.P. Hill. It had been stolen from an ATF agent's car.

To reach KARI PUGH: 540/374-5413 kpugh@freelancestar.com

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Date published: 6/30/2004