UPDATE, 8:06 pm:
Jason Aramburu contacted Huffington Post Travel to clear the air on the story that he is still shaken up over. According to Aramburu, he was traveling via Turkey on Turkish Airlines to Kenya, where he serves as the Founder and CEO of re:char, which, according to Aramburu, is "a social enterprise that provides subsistence farmers in Western Kenya with affordable technology to improve their crop yield and sequester atmospheric carbon."
Aramburu had earlier in the day flown from his native Texas to New York to catch a flight to Turkey, with the knife in his checked baggage. Aramburu says he was traveling with construction equipment, not auto parts as previously reported, to bring back to Kenya. He purchased the knife, which was listed as a "shoulder harness knife" on Amazon.com, in the United States for work in the field.
The trouble started, he says, when a woman in their group was called over the loudspeaker at JFK to speak with authorities. The knife was in the woman's checked luggage. Mr. Aramburu then spoke with police, telling them it was his knife and ended up getting arrested on the spot for criminal possession. "I've never even gotten a speeding ticket," Aramburu told The Huffington Post.
Aramburu was taken by Port Authority police to a holding cell at JFK airport, where he was held for roughly four hours before being transferred to Queens Central Booking in Kew Gardens, where he spent the night. "It was eye-opening for me," he adds. He was released from jail on Tuesday morning after a judge threw out his case.
His record will be cleared on January 27.
His trip to Kenya has been delayed a few weeks.
PREVIOUSLY, 10/5: Jason Aramburu, a 26-year-old passenger en route to Istanbul from New York's JFK airport, was stopped on Monday after TSA agents found a 'trench knife'--which comes with a large, folding blade and brass-knuckle handle--in his bag.
Aramburu, from San Antonio, was stopped around 4:50pm on Monday when an X-ray machine showed the item. Along with the knife, agents also found auto parts in the bag, the New York Post reports.
The Post reports that knives such as that are designed so the owner can wield the knife and the brass knuckles in one swing.
The catch by the TSA is solid, considering how they've missed daggers and swords, box cutters and knives on the 10-year anniversary of 9/11.