Pittsburgh Post-gazette : Terror force stands down on Heinz Field break-in try

Terror force stands down on Heinz Field break-in try

By Torsten Ove and Gary Rotstein | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 7, 2006

The two young men who tried to break into Heinz Field on Sunday morning appear to have been up to nothing more than fooling around like what they are -- a couple of college kids.

Although the Joint Terrorism Task Force responded to the incident and has been monitoring it after Pittsburgh police arrested the two Carnegie Mellon University students, all indications are that they were not bent on anything nefarious.

The FBI and federal prosecutors, who would certainly attempt to detain them if there were even a hint of terrorism, are no longer involved.

"They are not under any federal scrutiny," said Jeff Killeen, spokesman for the Pittsburgh FBI office. "Everything has been deferred to the district attorney's office."

City police on Sunday arrested Sudeep Paul, 21, of New York, and Anand Shankar Durvasula, 20, of California, after security guards at the field saw them trying to scale a fence at 1:48 a.m.

They had earlier entered a door at Gate B that hadn't sealed completely following a private party at one of the stadium's clubs, but they left for unexplained reasons and walked to Gate 5, a nearby service entrance. There they found a chair and started walking around with it, apparently looking for a way to get in, then returned to Gate 5. Mr. Durvasula then stepped up onto the chair and began scaling the fence, police said.

That's when guards, who had been watching them on security cameras, approached them. The students started to walk away, but were detained by city officers from the North Side station.

Authorities said the men, who were described as frightened after the arrest, initially explained that they had tickets to the 4:15 p.m. game and had decided to check things out so they knew where to go.

They later said they were filming a music video for a Carnegie Mellon film project. Mr. Paul, a film student, said he was in the final stages of completing a video featuring Mr. Durvasula and had planned to film the last scene at Heinz Field.

But they didn't have their video camera and tripod with them; police found those items inside a Lexus sport utility vehicle parked nearby.

Four bomb dogs responded to the scene, and two of them alerted on the vehicle, but no explosives were found. False alerts are not uncommon among bomb detection dogs, depending on their level of training, and experts said the animals sometimes alert to chemicals, particularly nitrates, inside electronic equipment such as cameras and other products.

Carnegie Mellon University officials declined to comment on the students, but their friends and peers on campus were abuzz with talk of their situation.

"The people I've talked to feel this is absolutely ridiculous," said Ramzi Ramsey, a senior from Sacramento, Calif., who is president of the Undergraduate Finance Association.

Mr. Paul is involved in the group as its activities director, and Mr. Ramsey said, "I couldn't see him hurting a fly. He's an honor student, one of the top students in our business class."

Mr. Paul was described as hard-working at his studies but also interested in many of the things typical of college students -- intramural sports, video games and weekend parties.

Student Gunnar Gissel said that when he once made a joke tied to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Paul, from Long Island about an hour from Manhattan, punched him on the arm and told him to knock it off.

"He got kind of combatively defensive about it," said Mr. Gissel, a senior from Alaska. "You can't drag him into anything off color. I'd be surprised if he was doing anything more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. ... Sudeep is not a terrorist."

The two student suspects are American-born, but of Indian descent, which one local defense attorney, Thomas Farrell, believes may have contributed to the tough reaction by authorities. A police affidavit filed Sunday mistakenly referred to "2 Middle Eastern males" trying to climb a fence at Heinz Field.

"Think about it. It's the kind of prank that college students do all over the country every week. It really does sound like people went overboard because of their ethnicity," said Mr. Farrell, a former federal prosecutor who is not involved in the students' case. Million-dollar bail cases, he said, "are for serious offenses, or if people have no ties to the country."

Still, said one first-year Carnegie Mellon student, Aditya Natraj, "they should have known better. You can't just do whatever you want. Just because you're shooting a film. ..."

The FBI and the National Football League, along with local authorities in every NFL city, have been on heightened alert since a threat to stadiums a few weeks ago that turned out to be a hoax by a Wisconsin man.

Before that happened, a stadium break-in would probably not have warranted the attention of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which is made up of numerous federal, local and state agencies. But now, no one's taking any chances.

Mr. Paul is charged with criminal conspiracy and Mr. Durvasula with criminal trespass and conspiracy.

Their bonds remained at $1 million each yesterday. Mike Manko, spokesman for the district attorney's office, said the bond could be reduced, but that has to happen at a bond hearing. As of yesterday afternoon, no hearing had been scheduled and Mr. Manko said he wasn't sure if the men had hired lawyers yet.

(Torsten Ove can be reached at tove@post-gazette.com or 412-231-0132. Gary Rotstein can be reached at grotstein@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1255. Staff writer Chico Harlan contributed. )