Tourist sparks bomb alert in restaurant after mistakenly ordering 'grenade'
A tourist sparked a bomb alert at a Lisbon restaurant when he confused the Portuguese words for “pomegranate” and “grenade” while attempting to order a drink.
The 36-year-old man, a Russian speaker from Azerbaijan, found himself handcuffed and surrounded by armed police after a language app gave him the wrong translation for the fruit juice he was trying to buy.
According to the Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manhã, the tourist used his phone to translate the Russian word for pomegranate and then wrote a sentence in Portuguese so staff at the restaurant in the Cais do Sodré district could understand his drinks order.
But the waiter read the inaccurate note as a threat and, fearing the customer was saying he had a grenade, called the police.
Anti-terrorism unit consulted
According to a video taken from a car park outside the restaurant on Friday afternoon, the tourist was ordered to lie face down on the ground in the street as five armed police officers approached and immobilised him, then cuffed his hands.
The tourist was taken to a nearby police station for interrogation. He was later released after it was found he was not in possession of any weapons. His hotel room was also searched.
A police spokesperson said officers were called to the restaurant and arrested the suspect as he tried to leave the establishment, before carrying out a “thorough inspection of the premises”.
Lisbon police also carried out a search of their databases and consulted sources from Portugal’s anti-terrorism coordination unit, but nothing was found.
The words for pomegranate and grenade are the same in the Russian language, however, in Portuguese they are two separate words (with romã meaning pomegranate and granada translating to grenade) - a distinction that may have been lost during the language app’s translation.
Earlier this month Portuguese security authorities raised the country’s official terrorist threat from moderate to significant, the third highest level. The move followed attacks by Islamic extremists in Belgium and France in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war.
