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Cops: Teen called in bomb threats to U.S. Open

By Matthew Sweeney, amNewYork Staff Writer | msweeney@am-ny.com

September 4, 2008

A teenage employee at the U.S. Open was charged Thursday for allegedly calling in prank bomb threats to the tennis tournament.

"We take bomb threats very seriously whether real or fake," Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said in a statement. "Either one has the potential for causing panic and serious injury to human life."

Mahmet Kadayifci, 19, of Elmhurst, was working his midnight to 8 a.m. shift Tuesday at the United States Tennis Association's command center in Flushing Meadows Corona Park when he made the prank calls, authorities said.

The command center received a call from an operator who identified herself as being from an Internet service that places phone calls for the hearing impaired, the Queens DA's office said. The operator said the message she was to deliver was of a bomb in Arthur Ashe Stadium. Ten minutes later another operator called from the online service with the message that there was a bomb in the USTA's fire command center. At 12:48 a.m., less than 30 minutes after the first call was placed, a third operator telephoned to say that there was a bomb in the command center and that this was the last warning.

All the while, Kadayifci, who is not hearing-impaired, was at the command center quietly typing e-mails to the phone service from his laptop, authorities said. When his shift ended, Kadayifci took a co-worker home and admitted that he called in the threats as a joke, the DA's office said. He was arrested at his home Wednesday and confessed.

"The defendant will now learn the hard way that a bomb threat is not a joking matter," Brown said.

The felony charges carry a maximum sentence of seven years.