Police detained one man at a Montreal airport after a suspicious package that contained items necessary to make a bomb was found on Sunday.
Spokesperson Ian Lafreniere told The Canadian Press that all the elements of a bomb were found in the package, except the explosives themselves. As individual items, the contents of the package did not present direct dangers. Still, Montreal police didn't want to take a chance on a potential bomb threat.
"For us, it is something major because everything was there to make us believe...a bomb, an explosive device," Lafreniere said. "The explosive was not found, but even then, everything was there to make us believe...this."
A 71-year-old man who was scheduled to fly out of Montreal was detained on Sunday, held in police custody, then questioned Monday morning. He hasn't been charged with a crime, nor have law enforcement officials released details about him.
"We're still questioning the suspect and we'll see what is the result of that," Lafreniere told Canadian news site The Star.
Airport security first spotted the package early on, during a check at one of Trudeau's U.S. departures area. According to police spokesperson Jean-Pierre Brabant, police were immediately called in to search the parcel, along with the luggage of other passengers on the flight.
"The suspicious package was controlled by the SWAT team, from there it was sent to a lab where there were some other evaluations made," Brabant told The Globe and Mail.
Police also searched an apartment in the residential neighborhood of LaSalle, and confiscated some documents they found there. They reported they hadn't found anything "obvious" during the initial searches. A section of the area was blocked off, while more than a dozen emergency vehicles assembled outside the apartment in question.
"There is going to be an approach that is going to be made in an apartment to get all the information so we can find some items inside the house that's going to help us and lead us to what was really inside the suspicious package," Brabant said.
