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The City of Saskatoon issued an apology this week to residents after police shut down one of the community’s main bridges for three hours so a bomb squad could probe a mysterious box chained to a lamp post that turned out to be a city-owned traffic counter.

At about 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, the height of rush hour, a resident called police to report a strange unlabelled plastic box roped to a light standard on the University Bridge, one of the main access routes across the South Saskatchewan River.The hard plastic waterproof box, known as a Pelican case, was resting “at the base of the pole,” said police spokeswoman Alyson Edwards.

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“It was sitting there and was basically locked to the pole with one of those thick metal cables.”

Police examined the box and tried to track down the owner, including calling the city’s 24-hour traffic dispatch, which was not aware of any such thing.

Investigators shut down the bridge and called in a two-man bomb squad who used X-ray equipment to scan the suspicious package. While they determined there weren’t any explosives, police warned the public that night that the box did contain “electronic equipment capable of capturing and transmitting traffic and/or pedestrian data to an unknown location.”