Bomb threat causes evacuation of Batangas capitol building

A phoned-in bomb threat triggered the evacuation of employees at the Batangas City capitol on Thursday afternoon, but the package left in front of the provincial government building supposedly containing the bomb turned out to be a dud. Batangas City police director Sr. Supt. Nilo Anzo said Thursday night that they called in an Air Force bomb disposal team and bomb-sniffing dogs to "detonate" the bomb, only to find out it didn’t contain explosives. "In front of the provincial capitol we found a suspected bomb in the trash can. A K-9 dog even sat on it. But it turned out to be a decoy. Walang pulbura (there were no explosives)," Anzo told GMA’s DZBB radio. Nevertheless, he said bomb experts "detonated" the item with a disruptor, and checked the whole building for possible bombs. He did not say if the phoned-in threat was a prank or a follow-up of last week's assassination attempt on Batangas Gov. Armando Sanchez when the official’s Hummer H2 vehicle was destroyed in a bomb blast that killed his driver and a bodyguard. Sanchez himself suffered second-degree burns in different parts of the body in last week's incident.-GMANews.TV