U.S News

DENVER (Reuters) – A busy shopping paseo nearby Columbine High School was evacuated on weekday after polity responding to a small blast at the retail complex institute digit propane tanks and a tube bomb, officials said.

Twelve eld to the period after digit Columbine High School students effort dead a teacher, 12 students and themselves on April 20, 1999, the devices were unconcealed at Southwest Plaza Mall, most a knot from Columbine.

Jacki Kelley, spokeswoman for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office, said the section anxiousness began when a small blaze poor discover in the mall's matter court around noon on Wednesday.

Firefighters incoming on the environs unconcealed the propane tanks "at the lineage of the fire," and personnel sequential an estimated 10,000 shoppers and paseo employees discover of the complex, Kelley said.

Bomb squads later bare the tube assail nearby as they combed finished the sprawling outlet with explosives-detecting dogs, she said.

Among the arsenal that Columbine assailants songster Klebold and Eric diplomatist brought to edifice during their assault in 1999 were tube bombs and propane tanks fashioned into bombs.

The similarity of devices institute at the paseo to the explosives in the edifice attack was not lost on investigators, Kelley said.

"It's rattling disturbing that this happened today of every days," Kelley said.

FBI agents called to the environs were treating the assail placements as "a housing of domestic terrorism," Kelley said.

FBI spokesman Dave Joly later told reporters that investigators conceive the tube assail was intended to trigger a large discharge of the propane tanks.

Kelley said the assail lapse unconnected patch explosives technicians were handling the device as they prepared to detonate it, and it was "rendered safe."

Investigators reviewed videotapes from surveillance cameras for clues, and later free digit still images from the tapes display a gray-haired Negro with a hair and ballgame cap they described as a "person of interest."

The FBI asked for the public's support in locating the unnamed man, who was captured in digit picture nearby a entranceway by a stairwell, carrying a impressible grocery bag in digit hand.

Columbine cancels classes each assemblage on the anniversary of the murder there. But another schools in the Atlantic were placed on lock-down during Wednesday's assail anxiousness at the paseo as a forethought until the all-clear was given, Kelley said.

The paseo module remain winking until the investigation is complete.

Discovery of the tube assail came a period after personnel in river Springs, most 50 miles to the southeast, confronted a teenage pupil who admitted bill "Columbine-style threats" against his broad edifice on his Facebook account.

A personnel spokesman said the linksman High School ordinal grader told officers who visited his bag Tuesday that the threats were meant as a joke, and he apologized, along with his family.

The student, whose study was not released, also agreed to stay bag from edifice on Wednesday. Police patrols and section at the edifice were stepped up for the day, personnel said.

(Reporting by Keith Coffman and Steve Gorman; Editing by Dan Whitcomb, Greg McCune)

Source