#Michigan state police hostage rescue team portable

#Michigan state police hostage rescue team portable

Rogers said the team`s stock of elaborate gear, ranging from portable satellite communications equipment to its own 4-wheel-drive ambulance, is packed and ready for loading onto a military cargo plane set aside for the team`s use. ''Everybody is on a pager 24 hours a day,'' he said. Given Hussein`s threats and a recent spate of related terrorist bombings abroad, ''We`re obviously sticking close to home,'' Rogers said.

The team even spent two weeks helping to restore order in the Virgin Islands after Hurricane Hugo decimated that area in 1989.īut ironically, it has never had to undertake the main job it was created for-freeing hostages from armed terrorists-although there is a nervous feeling around its training camp near Washington that such a day could be coming. In addition, team members have been sent overseas to arrest several drug dealers and Fawaz Yunis, a Lebanese terrorist lured onto a yacht rented by the FBI and later convicted in Washington of hijacking a plane in 1985 that had carried two Americans. The agents planned to roll through a chain-link fence around the prison in armored personnel carriers borrowed from the military. The team also prepared for possible assaults on federal prisons in Atlanta and Oakdale, La., in 1987 when Cuban inmates there rioted.

In another, an agent in Puerto Rico shot a gun out of the hand of a member of the Macheteros, a group that advocates independence for the Caribbean island.