A MAN who left his gym bag and a pair of jump leads in the back of his car sparked a terrorism alert at Harwell’s Science and Innovation Campus.

Michael Jenkins, 20, was working late at the firm Projector Lamps when specialist police officers summoned him out of the building and marched him at gunpoint to his Peugeot 205.

Armed police had mistaken his gym kit and the jump leads he used to start his car for a bomb.

A Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC) spokesman said last night officers were alerted after a patrol spotted a rucksack with “wires protruding”.

Mr Jenkins said: “There was no-one else around in the office.

“We’d problems with the computers all day, and I was staying late to try to fix them.

“I’d ordered Chinese food from Didcot to be delivered up to the office, so when I got a call, I assumed it was the delivery guy who’d got lost.”

But instead, he told how an ominous voice from the CNC ordered him to: “Leave the building with your hands where we can see them, and bring the keys for your Peugeot 205.”

Mr Jenkins said: “I thought it was a wind-up. When I walked out of the building it was just unbelievable. There were police everywhere.

“There was a road block at the top of the road with police dogs.”

With three machine guns trained on him, he walked, hands in the air, to his car, which has been stripped out for weekend rallying.

He said: “It was obviously something to do with my car. I wondered whether I’d hit something and not realised, but even then, I wasn’t sure they would have gone to all this trouble for that.

“I thought: ‘Is this really necessary?’ If I’d had a guilty conscious, I would have been a bit more worried.”

The police ordered him to open the car boot and his gym bag during the incident on Thursday, March 18.

“I said ‘I warn you now, there might be a pair of stained boxers in there,’ but they didn’t really laugh,” he added.

Mr Jenkins, who has worked at the site for four years, explained to the officers that he had not removed his gym bag after the previous night’s work-out and his 20-year-old Peugeot sometimes needed jump leads to get it started.

He was told officers had sealed off the area for two hours and knocked on his parents’ door in North Drive, Harwell, to ask if their son owned the G-reg car.

He said: “They said I was lucky I was not being charged for this, and I said I hadn’t done anything wrong.

“They didn’t apologise at all. They were really funny with me, as if it was my fault. They didn’t say sorry to my parents after scaring the living daylights out of them.”

He added: “The police were there for two hours without me knowing.

“If I’d decided I was going home, I would have run to my car in the rain, jumped in and driven off. God knows what could have happened.

“My colleagues laughed at the story at first, then my boss said I could have been another Jean Charles de Menezes (the man shot dead by police who mistook him for a suicide bomber).”

A spokesman for the Government’s Central Office of Information said: “A CNC dog handler on routine patrol outside the perimeter fence at Harwell saw a rucksack inside a car with wires protruding.

“He reported it and a 100-metre cordon was placed around the vehicle.

“Five CNC officers, who are routinely armed, attended the incident, as did an officer from Thames Valley Police.

“MOD bomb disposal officers were not at the incident. The owner of the vehicle was traced and found to live locally. He was asked to open the car and the rucksack and the incident was cleared.”