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U.S. Air Force installation in Los Angeles placed on lockdown

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[June 18, 2014]  LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A U.S. Air Force installation in Los Angeles was placed under a security lockdown for more than six hours on Tuesday afternoon as police investigated a report of a suspicious person at the base.

The Los Angeles Air Force Base, which serves as an administrative support post for a U.S. space and missile center in Colorado but conducts no flight operations of its own, was locked down as a precaution after security personnel received a report of suspicious activity on the base, the installation said.

The nature of the activity that prompted the alert was not specified, but the lockdown was lifted and the base was reopened at about 8 p.m. local time, once a building-to-building search found no sign of an actual threat, a base statement said.
 


The nearby Hawthorne Police Department said in a Twitter message posted at the start of the lockdown that it was assisting in the investigation of a "possible suspicious person on base," located about a mile from Los Angeles International Airport.

Local television station KTLA-TV reported a person was seen wearing a vest or backpack with wires protruding from it and possibly carrying ammunition magazines. There were no reports of shots having been fired.

Several streets surrounding the base were shut down during the investigation.

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According to its website, the Los Angeles Air Force Base provides administrative and base services to the personnel assigned to the Space and Missile Systems Center at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado.

(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Steve Gorman and Toby Chopra)

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