Three airport terminals evacuated

GRAPEVINE, Texas -- Three terminals at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport were evacuated Thursday after alarms sounded to indicate a bag may have contained explosive material, officials said.

"The machine found something," Transportation Security Administration spokesman Ed Martelle said Thursday night. "The problem is we don't know what and we don't know how much."

Neither the bag nor the man who carried it have been found.

"It begins to look less and less like someone was trying to avoid something," Martelle said after a review of the events.

Initial accounts that the man grabbed the bag and left were revised Thursday night after TSA officials re-examined screener comments.

Martelle said a screener was concerned about something that looked like power transformers or stereo speakers in the bag. The bag was screened a second time and was OK'd. Martelle said the screener handed the man the bag and he left, but the alarm then went off.

Martelle said the machine was checked and was performing accurately.

Martelle said he did not know what type of explosive material was detected.

Federal regulations that went into effect Jan. 1 require that all checked bags be screened for explosives by an X-ray machine or manually checked by a TSA screener. Carryon bags remain subject to the X-rays and random gate searches for explosives and other forbidden materials.

Thousands of passengers were being rescreened. The breech delayed at least 80 American Airlines and 20 American Eagle flights, airline officials said.

DFW is the third-busiest airport in the country. It had 777,386 takeoffs and landings in 2002.