The US State Department has officially apologized today for causing a city-wide panic in Oslo, Norway forcing the evacuation of the nation’s royal palace and much of the city’s downtown after the discovery of a fake bomb on an embassy vehicle.
The bomb had been placed on the vehicle as part of a training drill, and then they forgot it was there until security guards discovered it when the vehicle was trying to reenter embassy grounds.
The discovery sparked a full scale security alert, leading to special forces deployments around the embassy and panic in the surrounding area. A car bomb in downtown Oslo was the beginning of last year’s massacre by Anders Breivik, and security was needless to say spooked by the discovery.
The State Department expressed “regret” for the disturbance but defended the calls to panic after the discovery, saying it proves that they “take any potential threat seriously,” even one they invented themselves.
