Plane Carrying Idaho Murder Suspect Makes Illinois Pit Stop

CHAMPAIGN, IL — A Champaign airport was briefly placed on lockdown Wednesday after a private plane carrying Idaho quadruple murder defendant Bryan Kohberger made a pit stop on its way back to Idaho. Kohberger is accused in the deaths of four University of Idaho students.

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TMZ published photos of Kohberger being led back and forth from a private single-engine plane in handcuffs by federal law enforcement agents at Willard Airport in Champaign. TMZ reported that the 11-passenger plane owned by Pennsylvania State Police landed around 11 a.m. on Wednesday at the airport and that Kohberger was led into Flightstar, which the report said is a private fixed-base carrier that runs out of the Champaign airport. Willard Airport is operated by the University of Illinois.

The report indicated that the airport was evacuated for a few minutes while the plane refueled and Kohberger, 28, was permitted to use the bathroom before reboarding the plane back to Moscow, Idaho.

However, in an email to Patch on Thursday, Tim Bannon, the executive director of Willard Airport, said that reports of the airport being evaluated and placed on lockdown on Thursday are inaccurate. He said that no airport staff was involved in the stop of the plane extraditing Kohberger from Pennsylvania back to Idaho on Wednesday.

Bannon said that any lockdown at the airport would have happened at his direction and said that the lockdown element of the TMZ report was likely made to make the story "more engaging," he wrote to Patch.

"It definitely didn't happen," Bannon told Patch.

Photos showed Kohberger arriving back in Moscow on Wednesday night. The Washington State University graduate student was booked on four counts of first-degree murder and felony burglary charges in connection with the brutal November killings in Moscow, which rocked the small Idaho town and drew nationwide attention as weeks passed with no formal suspect announced.

Related: Idaho Student Murders: New Details Into Bryan Kohberger's Arrest, Past

Kohberger, who was arrested on Dec. 30 at his parents' home in Pennsylvania, is accused of stabbing four students to death at an off-campus rental home in the early hours of Nov. 13. The students were identified as Ethan Chapin, 20, of Conway, Washington; Madison Mogen, 21, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; Xana Kernodle, 20, of Avondale, Arizona; and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, of Rathdrum, Idaho.

Kohberger, who had just completed his first semester as a Ph.D. student at Washington State University’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, was due to make his initial court appearance in Idaho Thursday morning.

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