Passenger causing Thursday airport shutdown was at center of 2003 plague scare

the plague-related charges. Officials decided to evacuate the airport and detain Butler, who cooperated fully, the law enforcement official said.

A Miami-Dade police bomb squad spent hours scouring the airport. Between 100 and 200 passengers were evacuated from four of the airport’s six concourses. Airport roadways and a hotel near the airport’s international terminal were closed down. Police and airport officials described the shutdown of the concourses as a public safety precaution.

Butler was released after tests showed that he, the container, and his other belongings did not contain any hazardous biological material or explosives, the official said.

The canister was used to transport dead bacteria samples and was a legitimate experiment, said another government official who also requested anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation. Without naming Butler, the official said the scientist is a professor at Ross University, a medical school in the Caribbean island of Dominica, and on a teaching assignment in Saudi Arabia.

Passengers, workers, and others were allowed back in just as the airport was expecting the first of 1,500 passengers on flights between 4 and 6 a.m. alone — and more thereafter. “Everything’s back to normal,” airport spokesman Greg Chin said.

Butler’s 2003 report of missing plague vials set off a frantic search that ended when Butler gave FBI agents a written statement in which he admitted a “misjudgment” in not telling his supervisor that the vials had been “accidentally destroyed,” according to court records. At trial, Butler testified that FBI agents forced him to make the admission to calm the public’s fears.

Turley said the Miami incident “appears to be a fantastic overreaction,” and is “ironic because we defeated all the national security counts in the case.”

“The only plague claim he was convicted of was a highly technical paper violation; he literally checked the wrong box on the form,” Turley said. He added, “I find it strange to evacuate an airport because a guy was convicted of contractual violations with a university.”

Peter Agre, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist who supported Butler against the 2003 charges, said he would be astonished if Butler did anything wrong. “I suspect because he’s Tom Butler and on a list as coming from Saudi Arabia, he’s being scrutinized and somebody pushed the panic button,” Agre said in a telephone interview from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

Butler was on supervised release from prison until 2008. He also agreed to retire from Texas Tech and to surrender his medical license. .He is not currently licensed in Texas, a spokeswoman for the Texas Medical Board said Friday.