Rex in the City

Melbourne is Terror City, and the good burghers of the Southern capital are quaking and quivering under the Terror Broadside unleashed upon an unsuspecting Melbourne by the Herald Sun. Australia’s Favourite Newspaper

Here’s the sequence.

On Wednesday a suspcious gas leak at the Virgin Blue Terminal caused panic. Paramedics, firefighters and hazardous materials crews in full protective clothing rushed to the airport .. after staff in a domestic terminal began suffering nausea and vomiting, dizziness, headaches and respiratory problems. The airport was evacuated

On Thursday, Police feared the worst, when a bomb alert was raised at Knox City shopping centre. There was pandemonium as thousands of panicking shoppers, many with young children, raced to the nearest exits. Children cried and people screamed as evacuation sirens
blared.
Thankfully the bomb turned out to be a hoax, but a very elaborate one. It had all the things you would expect in such a device except explosives. It was very elaborate, it was very complicated and it was constructed in a way that we believed it could have been an explosive device". The paper importantly pointed out that anyone could find out how to construct such a device simply by accessing the Internet, thus reminding us that everyone was suspect.

Also on Friday, we are reminded that Melbourne is Terror target Number One as the Commonwealth Games come to town. We will be treated to an unprecedented security blitz involving thousands of Victorian and federal police, armed forces, anti-terrorist specialists and private guards.
The suburb of Parkville will be a security exclusion zone, There will be two tiers of security checks. Roads will be blocked at four strategic points well away from the village perimeter fence with residents issued with IDs and only VIP allowed near the athletes. (Well who’d have the nerve to go anywhere near Parkville with all this Terror happening anyway).

Super Slueth Andrew Bolt is onto the case of course. He blames mass hysteria. I wonder where that could have come from?