Russian police have arrested a 34-year-old man for threatening to bomb a Moscow bank.
The Muscovite, who was holding a device “similar to a bomb,” entered a bank on Sadovnicheskaya ulitsa, announced that he was unable to make payments on a loan he had received, and threatened to “blow up” the building.
Some 1,500 people were evacuated from the bank and the adjoining shopping mall as a safety precaution, the Moskva news agency reported.
The man was arrested by police, and bomb disposal experts found no dangerous material at the scene. The man now faces criminal charges of “falsely reporting an act of terrorism,” Moskva reported.
The case mirrors that of bankrupt Russian businessman Aram Petrosyan, who took hostages in a central Moscow branch of Citibank in August and threatened to detonate a homemade bomb.
The 55-year-old had uploaded a message to video sharing website Youtube in which he told President Vladimir Putin that bankruptcy had forced him to “dramatically violate Russia’s criminal code.”
He later released all hostages and surrendered to the police.
Read more from The Moscow Times: Russia's Debt Collectors Bringing Back the Brutality of the 1990s.
