Florida, United States, Wednesday July 11, 2018- A woman who was headed to Barbados on Sunday was not only prevented from getting on her flight, but was fined after Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents at Miami International Airport Discovered she had a snake hidden in a computer hard drive in her checked bag.
The traveler was not named.
“The snake, that didn’t get on a plane thanks to our officers’ diligent screening, had been artfully concealed inside the electronics of a hard drive and placed in a checked bag headed for a flight to Barbados,” TSA spokesperson Sari Ko-shetz said.
It was while the passenger’s bag was being screened that a TSA saw an “organic mass”. A TSA bomb expert who was called into the baggage screening room to investigate the hard drive discovered a small, live Ball Python in nylon stocking.
The United States Fish and Wildlife Services subsequently took away the reptile and fined the passenger.
“While this mass inside the electronic device was obviously not an imminent terrorist threat to the traveling public, the interception did prevent a possible wildlife threat on an aircraft. Animals of many species have been known to escape and chew through wires with fatal results,” Ko-shetz said.
