Friday, November 19, 2010

Haitian robocall spooks U.S. Army base

With election day coming up on the 28th of this month, Haiti’s presidential and legislative candidates are campaigning very hard. One strategy led to a scare at a U.S. army base hundreds of miles away from the Caribbean country:
Fort Bragg officials say it appears political robocalls from Haiti led to a series of evacuations around the sprawling Army post. 

Spokesman Tom McCollum said Fort Bragg received numerous phone calls Wednesday that included someone speaking in French Creole. Officials heard a garbled word that sounded like "bomb," suspected that they were bomb threats and initiated evacuations. First responders searched the buildings and found nothing threatening.

The campaign calls were made to other parts along the east coast of the U.S. on Wednesday. One Haitian community activist in Florida claimed that the calls came from one of the eighteen presidential candidates who was “telling people here that he wants to get elected."

Image- AFP via BBC News (“In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, posters promote the campaigns of candidates in the country's elections” held in 2006).
Online Sources- CBS News, UPI, newsobserver.com

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