Reports of what initially appeared to be an incendiary device placed at a Seoul subway station caused citizens to run out of harm’s way and disrupted subway operations for nearly three hours on Monday.

Police confirmed that the device in a black briefcase was not an explosive. The briefcase was found at around 2:15 p.m. at Gangnam-gu District Office Station linking two major subway lines.

“We opened the briefcase and found clothes and metal hangers, which at first, seemed to be a detonator through the X-ray examiner,” a police official told reporters, declining to be named.

Immediately after the briefcase was found, police, a military bomb disposal team and bomb-sniffing dogs were deployed to the site. Police cordoned off all entrances to the station and stopped operations of the Bundang line pending an on-site investigation.

By Song Sang-ho (sshluck@heraldcorp.com)