Raf Sanchez

Originally published on Times Online

After waving goodbye to his beloved at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey he wanted just one more clinch.

So he slipped past security, planted a kiss … and caused a security alert that closed the terminal for six hours.

Video footage released in the US shows a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officer leave his post for just over a minute, giving the unidentified man time to walk unchallenged into a secure area on Sunday.

The woman is seen lifting a rope for the man to pass under. He kisses her before the pair walk hand-in-hand out of the shot.

Earlier in the film the officer apparently asks the same man to move away from the security cordons that guide arriving passengers out of the secure area and into the concourse.

Another passenger reported the breach and the TSA officer has now been placed on administrative leave.

The footage was released by Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, who said it highlighted continuing weaknesses in airport security less than two weeks after a Nigerian man attempted to blow up a flight to Detroit on Christmas day.

“That’s like having a fire truck with a flat in it and nobody bothers looking at it until the alarm goes off,” Mr Lautenberg said in a news conference at the airport

Thousands of passengers were forced to go through airport security for a second time when the airport finally reopened.

Newark, one of the three main airports serving the New York City area, is especially sensitive to security breaches as one of the aircraft hijacked on September 11 took off from the site. United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers overpowered the hijackers.

Meadows Field airport in California was shut down briefly on Tuesday after a suspicious amber liquid in a passenger’s bag tested positive for explosives only for it later to emerge the liquid was honey.