Bomb Scare at Airport Is Just a Child’s Game : Terrorism: It looked like dynamite in the X-ray. But when police blew up bag, they found Nintendo.

To the U.S. Customs Service agent at Los Angeles International Airport, the object spotted by an X-ray machine in a piece of luggage bound for Colombia on an Avianca Airlines jet looked like “three sticks of dynamite, bound together.”

Los Angeles Police Department bomb squad experts weren’t willing to get that descriptive, but after viewing the X-rays early today they decided they had a “suspicious device” on their hands. They hauled it out to a remote spot at the western edge of the airport and blew it to smithereens. Then they examined the smithereens.

The device turned out to be a Nintendo video game. Or what was left of one.

None of the agencies involved--not the airline, not the police, not customs, or the FBI, which was called in on the case--criticized the operation.

All of them agreed that, in the wake of the explosion of an Avianca jetliner over Colombia earlier this week, the concerns that led to the destruction of the luggage were well founded.

The flight for which the luggage had been destined--Avianca’s Flight 73 to Bogota--had originally been scheduled to leave LAX at 7:20 p.m. Tuesday. Because of mechanical problems, the jet to be used on the flight was held up at Mexico City, and Flight 73 was rescheduled for Wednesday.

As a result, screening of the baggage for Flight 73 at LAX’s Bradley International Terminal was delayed until about 12:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Mike Lovern, a customs supervisor at the airport, said the screening is a routine procedure for Avianca flights that has been intensified because of Monday’s explosion of an Avianca Boeing 727 jetliner shortly after takeoff from Bogota that killed all 107 aboard. Drug traffickers have claimed they bombed the jet.

Lovern said he was studying the images of the baggage passing through the X-ray machine shortly after midnight when he saw “the image of three sticks of dynamite, bound together,” in a piece of soft-sided luggage.

He said he ran the piece through again, and saw the same thing.

The customs supervisor said he called Los Angeles Airport Police, who called Los Angeles police, who dispatched their bomb squad.