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Eiffel Tower evacuated after bomb alert

16 September 2010 02:55 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Police evacuated some 2,000 people from the Eiffel Tower and the park surrounding the Paris landmark on Tuesday following a bomb alert that turned out to be a false alarm, the police said, APA reports quoting AFP.
Within hours police also briefly cleared a suburban train station not far from Notre-Dame cathedral after a bomb alert but no device was found.
"The company managing the Eiffel Tower received an anonymous telephone call around 8:20 pm (1820 GMT)," a Paris police official told AFP.
"Special units, one with sniffer dogs, went to the site to search the Eiffel Tower floor by floor," the official said.
"Around 2,000 people were evacuated," the official added.
The 324-metre (1,063-feet) high tower has three floors open to visitors and is one of the biggest tourist attractions in the world.
The tower, which also has two restaurants, normally closes at 11:00 pm.
The people evacuated, mostly French and foreign tourists, were asked to stay on the nearby Seine river banks and the Champ de Mars park to the east, and the tower area was cordoned off, an AFP reporter on the scene said.
Around a dozen police vehicles could be seen inside the cordoned-off area.
The cordons were later removed and several dozen Eiffel Tower staff were allowed to enter the structure to collect their belongings.
"Nothing was found. It was a false alarm," a police officer at the scene told reporters.
The Eiffel Tower was built in two years by engineer Gustave Eiffel as the centerpiece of the 1889 world fair in Paris.
In central Paris police briefly evacuated the platforms at the Saint Michel suburban train station after an anonymous phone call.
Platforms of the RER C line which runs along the Seine river were closed for nearly an hour, the state rail company SNCF said.
On the intersecting RER B line which runs north-south, the platform was evacuated at the request of the police for 15 minutes, a spokesman for the Paris transit operator RATP said.
The station was reopened after a police check.