Tea and apathy in Christchurch bomb scare

Tea and apathy in Christchurch bomb scare

09 October 2005
By KIM KNIGHT and JANINE BENNETTS

New York goes on full terror alert...Christchurch keeps shopping. The American city last week hunkered down against an unspecified security risk, but New Zealand's southern capital spent its Saturday ignoring the alleged bomb in the rubbish bin.


"There's a bomb threat," says the man with the English accent, leaning on the counter of that most English of institutions, Ballantynes department store. "I've never felt so at home."

The excited women in their berets and cardies collect their purchases. "A bomb threat? I wish I'd brought my hair straighteners."

An elderly man cruises the police lines with a video camera. Cellphone cameras go snap. Nothing to see here, on the corner of City Mall, where the street is closed but in the upstairs food hall people queue for window seats.

The rain slicks the police emergency tape and the police take to their cars. The tourists stand against the cordon, sip their tea and wait for the bang. "The police say it's bomb," says a Thai woman. Californian Corrine Terry, 68, has spent the morning at a Maori cultural performance. She's part of a 42-person American tour group waiting to check into the Grand Chancellor.

"We didn't expect this... especially in New Zealand... we thought after Bali, it was Australia."

Her pink lipstick has worn thin, her white sneakers are wet. She thinks she'll wait it out in a bar.

Some of the Auckland rugby team emerge from the food hall. Tall, brown, solid. "Oh, it's a bomb scare," says flanker Jerome Kaino. Is he scared? "No, I've stayed here before. It's a good little city."

The imitation bomb left in a rubbish bin after a party on Friday night shut down Christchurch central city for more than six hours yesterday. Three blocks of the central city mall were cordoned and police evacuated about 300 people from buildings in the area.

Police were notified about 9am of a suspected explosive device in a bin outside the Inland Revenue Department and the Grand Chancellor Hotel on Cashel St. At 3pm, a man in his late 20s contacted police saying he had been at a bad taste party the night before, with an imitation bomb which he left in a bin after he wasn't allowed into any establishments with it.

Sergeant Murray Hurst described the "bomb" as "sticks that looked like dynamite wound together with string and wire".

An Army bomb squad tried three times to detonate the device as emergency services stood by.

Any criminal or civil liability has yet to be decided.