Two men from Nova Scotia have been arrested in connection with a security incident at the border crossing between Woodstock, N.B., and Houlton, Maine on Friday.
New Brunswick RCMP say at 10:15 a.m., they responded to a report of a suspicious vehicle that had stopped in the area between the Canada and U.S. border crossings.
Police say the two men inside the vehicle were refusing to communicate with Canada Border Services Agency officials or police.
Around 5:15 p.m., the RCMP tweeted that the issue had been resolved and two men were arrested by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The vehicle was also seized.
The suspects are a 21-year-old man from Halifax and a 22-year-old man from Sackville, N.S.
A spokesperson for the Canada Border Services Agency said the agency cannot comment, and referred all questions to the RCMP.
John Slipp, who owns the duty-free shop on the Canadian side of the border, told Global News he first heard about the incident at around 10 a.m.
He says customers told him and his staff that they saw a green car, which looked like it was from the 1960s, stopped in the middle of the road before the border on the Canadian side.
According to Slipp, the occupants of the vehicle would not come out despite being ordered to by border agents.
“About noon, [border agents] came back to me and said, ‘We’re going to evacuate operations. Please leave and leave now,'” he said.
Slipp says he was concerned about the safety of his staff and customers, but that they didn’t feel threatened.
“I felt the customs, RCMP and U.S. authorities had things well in hand,” he said.
Slipp, who has owned the store since 1994, has only encountered this type of border closure twice before: the first on 9/11 and more recently about five years ago.
On Twitter, the agency said they were experiencing a “service disruption.”
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