2010-07-16 08:08

URUMQI - A commercial flight that left Xinjiang for Guangdong on Wednesday evening made an emergency landing in a neighboring province following a bomb threat that turned out to be a hoax, civil aviation authorities said on Thursday.

Police in Guangzhou, capital of South China's Guangdong province, received an anonymous phone call "some time after 7 pm", claiming there was a bomb on board China Southern flight CZ3912, which took off from Urumqi, capital of Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, at 7:30 pm for Guangzhou, said a notice on the website of Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC).

The plane, a Boeing 777-200, made an unscheduled landing at 9:53 pm at an airport in Lanzhou, capital of Gansu province that neighbors Xinjiang.

All the 93 passengers, including a baby and 10 foreigners, and 18 crew members were evacuated before the police launched a search for any explosives.

The search was called off at 4 am on Thursday after no bomb was found aboard, the CAAC notice said.

The plane took off with the passengers again on Thursday morning and arrived at its original destination at noon.

The bomb scare came a week after the first anniversary of the July 5 riot in Urumqi that left nearly 200 people dead.

"Police are now investigating the anonymous call. Those found responsible for spreading such information and threatening civil aviation safety will be punished according to the law," the notice said.

Li Wei, director of the anti-terrorism research center under the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, said spreading information that threatens public safety could be deemed an act of terror.

"The bomb hoax could be an attempt to terrorize, depending on the caller's motivation," he said.

Bomb hoaxes on Chinese commercial flights have not been uncommon in recent years.

In March, a passenger was detained for five days for telling an airline there was a bomb on its Beijing-Wuhan flight. The passenger created the hoax because he was running late for the flight.

But the motivation behind Wednesday's anonymous hoax was still unclear as of Thursday evening.

A spokesman for China Southern said though the incident had not disrupted any other flights, it "would certainly be taken as a warning to tighten security checks".

Wei Xiaodong, a senior police official posted at the Urumqi international airport, said: "Police will beef up patrolling forces at the airport to secure aircraft safety, though we will not escalate the level of security checks for passengers at the airport."

Previously, China Southern flights leaving from Xinjiang have also been at the center of terrorist attacks.

In 2008, air police foiled a terrorist attempt to crash a China Southern flight from Urumqi by setting fire on board. The plane made an emergency landing in Lanzhou and the passengers were safe.

In January 2010, a China Southern flight to Wuhan, which returned to Urumqi after a fire alarm in the toilet was triggered, was also doubted to be a terrorist act at first. But police later denied it, blaming it on a smoking passenger.

"This latest bomb hoax showed that potential terrorist threats have been existing in the country all along," Li Wei, the Beijing-based anti-terrorism expert, said.

Xinhua and AP contributed to this story.