Original Article Rethink after Paris airport gaffe French police have been routinely using the technique French police say they will ban their technique for training dogs after a bag with plastic explosives was lost at a Paris airport during an exercise. Police placed the bag in a passenger's luggage at Charles de Gaulle airport to see if sniffer dogs would detect it, but it was then loaded onto a flight. The order to halt such training methods came after Prime Minister J-P Raffarin voiced concern at the bungled exercise. Police say the explosives used cannot be activated without detonators. However, the bag in which they were planted has still not been traced. Passenger 'at risk' "The procedures that were used Friday night will no longer be allowed," Pierre Bouquin, spokesman for France's police force known as gendarmes, was quoted as saying by the AFP news agency. "We're going to stop practicing this on the bags of travellers," the spokesman added. Earlier, Jean-Pierre Raffarin insisted that any future training must guarantee "the respect of the private life of passengers". "The fight against terrorism and insecurity is a priority for the government, but [Raffarin] made clear his concern in the face of the way the training... was conducted" at the airport, a statement from Mr Raffarin's office said. The statement said the existing procedures were "susceptible to making the relevant passenger run a risk in the eyes of foreign authorities when arriving in the destination country". Whisked away During the exercise, police deliberately placed the bag with up to 150g explosives in a randomly chosen passenger's luggage as it passed along a conveyer belt. One of the sniffer dogs involved in the exercise successfully detected the item, but the other failed. Police than tried to repeat the exercise, but the bag had been mistakenly whisked off. The explosives could have made it onto any of 90 flights leaving Charles de Gaulle airport that evening, police said. http://www.dehavilland.co.uk/webhost.asp?wci=default&wcp=AviationStoryPage&ItemID=7247823&ServiceID=8&filterid=1&searchid=37655 Bungled security exercise at Paris airport 06/12/2004 French gendarmes have said they will review techniques for training sniffer dogs after a bag containing plastic explosives was lost at a Paris airport during a routine exercise. The bag in which the explosives were planted has still not been traced. Police planted the explosives in a passenger's luggage at Charles de Gaulle airport to see if sniffer dogs would detect them. The bag was then mistakenly loaded onto a flight. Although police have claimed the explosives cannot be activated without detonators, prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin has voiced his concerns over the debacle. He insisted that any future training must guarantee "the respect of the private life of passengers". A later statement from the French premier's office also declared: "The fight against terrorism and insecurity is a priority for the government, but Raffarin made clear his concern in the face of the way the training was conducted." Only one of the sniffer dogs involved in the exercise managed to detect the 150g of plastic explosive. According to gendarmes, the explosive could have been on any of the 90 flights leaving from Charles de Gaulle airport that evening. 1998-2004 DeHavilland Information Services plc. All rights reserved. http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/news/wabc_120404_explosives.html Explosives Disappear at Paris Airport (Paris-WABC, December 4, 2004) Crews were busy training bomb sniffing dogs at the Charles de Gaule Airport in Paris when the explosives they were supposed to be searching for disappeared. Now French police say they don't know where they are. Flights out of Paris arrived in Los Angeles and New York. One flight and its 300 Air France passengers were held at L.A.X. while their luggage was thoroughly searched. In New York both American Airlines and Air France arriving flights were also searched as officials looked to find the missing explosives. Nothing was found. French police say the explosives are harmless because no detonators were attached.