U.S. Open Employee Accused Of Making Bomb Threat
Posted on Thursday, 4 of September , 2008 at 7:12 pm
QUEENS—A teenage employee at the U.S. Open Tennis Championships in Flushing Meadows, Queens, has been charged with making a series of phone calls to the venue Wednesday – while at work – claiming that a bomb had been planted at the Arthur Ashe Stadium there. The threats turned out to be a hoax.
Mahmet M. Kadayifci, 19, of 34-24 77th St. in the Elmhurst section of Queens. Kadayifci, who is a contracted employee with the U.S. Tennis Association (USTA) assigned to the fire watch area at the U.S. Open, is presently awaiting arraignment in Queens Criminal Court in Kew Gardens on charges of first- and second-degree falsely reporting an incident. If convicted, he faces up to seven years in prison.
Prosecutors said that shortly after midnight on Tuesday evening, the USTA Command Center received a telephone call from a female operator advising them that she worked as a relay operator for a company that facilitated conversations between hearing and hearing impaired individuals and that she had a message from a client that stated a bomb had been placed within Arthur Ashe Stadium. Ten minutes later, the Command Center received a second call from another operator, this time advising them that a bomb had been placed in the USTA’s Fire Command Center.
District attorney Richard A. Brown said that it is further alleged that at approximately 12:48 a.m., less than 30 minutes after the first call was received, an employee at the USTA Fire Command Center received a call from a third operator relaying a client’s message that stated there was a bomb in the fire command center and that this was a final warning. The employee immediately notified his supervisor of the threat. At the time all three messages were received, Kadayifci was working at the USTA Fire Command Center and it is alleged that he had a laptop with him which he continually accessed.
At the time of his arrest last night, Kadayifci, who is not hearing impaired, allegedly told police that he used his laptop to access a website called Go America, which he then used to place the three bomb threats while at work as a prank.
Brown said that such companies as Go America allow people to communicate via a phone using trained operators to act as a go-between hearing and hearing-impaired individuals. A hearing impaired person taps out their message on a keyboard and the text is then read aloud by the operator to a hearing person. 9-4-08
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Category: Courts, Crime, Sports
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